100 Epic Reads of a Lifetime

For my birthday, my boyfriend got me scratch-off poster of “100 Epic Reads of a Lifetime.” Almost immediately upon opening it, he wanted me to scratch off all of the books I’ve read before so that I had knew what books I still needed to read in my lifetime. I decided however that, despite having read some of the books on the poster, I will not scratch them off until I’ve re-read them – to treat this list of 100 epic reads from scratch. When it comes to picking which books to scratch off, I’ve decided to take the poster one row at a time, picking a single book from each row before moving on to the next.*

*with the exception of books read for New England literary trip in March 2022.

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The Alchemist	The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy	Life of Pie	The Fault in Our Stars	To Kill a Mockingbird	Moby Dick	The Catcher in the Rye	The Great Gatsby	The DaVinci Code	The Little Prince
The Handmaid’s Tale	The Hunger Games	A Clockwork Orange	The Count of Monte Cristo	The Old Man and the Sea	Frankenstein	The Secret Garden	Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	And Then There Were None	Charolette’s Web
Pride & Prejudice	Don Quixote	The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo	Alice’s Adventure’s in Wonderland	A Christmas Carol	The Kite Runner	The Road	The Giver	Dracula	Anne of Green Gables
Northern Lights	The Book Thief	Grapes of Wrath	The Phantom Tollbooth	The Time Traveler’s Wife	The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes	Midnight’s Children	The Lord of the Rings	Fahrenheit 451	Things Fall Apart
Of Mice and Men	Lord of the Flies	The Adventures of Tom Sawyer	Oliver Twist	The Color Purple	Call of the Wild	Little Women	Romeo & Juliet	Hamlet	A Tale of Two Cities
Wuthering Heights	The Shadow of the Wind	1984	The Odyssey	The Poisonwood Bible	The Brothers Karamazov	Crime and Punishment	Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	On the Road	Ulysses
The Help	Great Expectations	Beloved	Outlander	Animal Farm	David Copperfield	Emma	The Stand	The Chronicles of Narnia	Lolita
Memoirs of a Geisha	Rebecca	Dune	Jane Eyre	The Princess Bride	Brave New World	Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret	A Game of Thrones	Never Let Me Go	Cutting for Stone
The Hobbit	Portnoy’s Complaint	The Sun Also Rises	One Hundred Years of Solitude	A Wrinkle in Time	Love in the Time of Cholera	In Cold Blood	Water for Elephants	Atonement	The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Far From the Madding Crowd	Ender’s Game	Anna Karenina	The Five People You Meet in Heaven	War and Peace	Catch-22	A Prayer for Owen Meany	A Suitable Boy	Slaughter House Five	The Bell Jar

Row 1:
01/15/21 – “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald – 5/5
I started off with this book for two reasons: 1) It is one of my favorite books [so much so, that I do, in fact, have a tattoo to prove it] and 2) “The Great Gatsby” has officially entered the public domain and “Nick” by Michael Farris Smith (a pseudo-prequel to “Gatsby”) was just released – making it an ideal time to revisit the book before cracking open Nick Carraway’s origin story.

03/07/22 – “Moby Dick” by Herman Mellville – 4/5
This book was read as part of the New England literary trip of March 2022.

Row 2:
05/14/21 – “The Hunger Games” by Suzanne Collins – 5/5
I picked this book because “The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” (the prequel to “Hunger Games) has been sitting on my shelf waiting to be read; and, I want to re-read this – having not read it since the first time nearly 10 years ago – before I read this newest release in the franchise.

Row 3:
12/20/21 – “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens – 3/5
I picked this book simply because it’s almost Christmas.

Row 4:
02/28/22 – “Things Fall Apart” by Chinua Achebe – 5/5
I picked this book for two reasons: 1) I needed to clear this row in order to get to the next one, which contains books – plural – that pertain to a road trip I’m taking in a couple of weeks [more on that later] and 2) of the books in this row, this was the only one already on my bookshelf.

Row 5:
03/05/22 – “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott – 3/5
This book was read as part of the New England literary trip of March 2022.

03/24/22 – The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain – 3/5
This book was read as part of the New England literary trip of March 2022.

Row 6:

Row 7:

Row 8:

Row 9:
03/23/22 – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain – 3/5
This book was read as part of the New England literary trip of March 2022.

Row 10:
03/13/22 – The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath – 4/5
This book was read as part of the New England literary trip of March 2022.