The Books

Here's the complete list of books that are on Daily Candy's 101 Books We Can't Live Without.

1. A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
2. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, by Carson McCullers
3. The History of Love, by Nicole Krauss
4. A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway
5. The Imperfectionists, by Tom Rachman
6. You Get So Alone At Times That It Just Makes Sense, by Charles Bukowski
7. The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion
8. The Harry Potter Series, by J.K. Rowling
9. Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee
10. On the Road, by Jack Kerouac
11. Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell
12. Into the Wild, by Jon Krakauer
13. Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
14. Lunch Poems, by Frank O'Hara
15. Down and Out in Paris and London, by George Orwell
16. A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving
17. Little Bee, by Chris Cleave
18. The Human Stain, by Philip Roth
19. Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison
20. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
21. Revolutionary Road, by Richard Yates
22. The Sookie Stackhouse Series, by Charlaine Harris
23. White Noise, by Don DeLillo
24. Summer Sisters, by Judy Blume
25. The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
26. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, by Betty Smith
27. The Things They Carried, by Tim O'Brien
28. Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens
29. Scruples, by Judith Krantz
30. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen
31. We Need to Talk About Kevin, by Lionel Shriver
32. The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
33. Garner's Modern American Usage, by Bryan A. Garner
34. Kissing in Manhattan, by David Schickler
35. A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
36. Water for Elephants, by Sara Gruen
37. Bastard Out of Carolina, by Dorothy Allison
38. Geek Love, by Katherine Dunn
39. In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
40. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding
41. Naked, by David Sedaris
42. Prep, by Curtis Sittenfield
43. Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert A. Heinlein
44. The Other Boleyn Girl, by Phillippa Gregory
45. One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46. The Stand, by Stephen King
47. The Road, by Cormac McCarthy
48. The Devil in the White City, by Erik Larson
49. Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
50. The Sun Also Rises, by Ernest Hemingway
51. A Separate Peace, by John Knowles
52. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon
53. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, by Maya Angelou
54. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
55. The Help, by Kathryn Stockett
56. Skinny Legs and All, by Tom Robbins
57. The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger
58. The Feast of Love, by Charles Baxter
59. Let the Great World Spin, by Colum McCann
60. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes
61. A Walk in the Woods, by Bill Bryson
62. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee
63. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, by Jonathan Safran Foer
64. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, by Milan Kundera
65. Love in the Time of Cholera, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
66. The Cider House Rules, by John Irving
67. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini
68. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, by Michael Chabon
69. Little House on the Prairie, by Laura Ingalls Wilder
70. Of Mice and Men, by John Steinbeck
71. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime, by Mark Haddon
72. Me Talk Pretty One Day, by David Sedaris
73. Motherless Brooklyn, by Jonathan Lethem
74. Tao Te Ching, by Stephen Mitchell
75. The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls
76. Life of Pi, by Yann Martel
77. What is the What, by Dave Eggers
78. The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen
79. Catch-22, by Joseph Heller
80. Gone With the Wind, by Margaret Mitchell
81. Little Women, by Louisa May Alcott
82. Nine Stories, by J.D. Salinger
83. Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson
84. The Art of Racing in the Rain, by Garth Stein
85. Special Topics in Calamity Physics, by Marisha Pessl
86. A Million Little Pieces, by James Frey
87. When a Crocodile Eats the Sun, by Peter Godwin
88. Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann
89. The Millennium Trilogy, by Stieg Larsson
90. Anna Karenina, by Leo Tolstoy
91. The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
92. The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
93. Never Let Me Go, by Kazuo Ishiguro
94. Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides
95. Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
96. Kitchen Confidential, by Anthony Bourdain
97. I am Charlotte Simmons, by Tom Wolfe
98. Freedom, by Jonathan Franzen
99. Flowers in the Attic, by V.C. Andrews
100. Damage, by John Lescroart
101. A Wild Sheep Chase, by Haruki Murakami

The Challenge

It’s been a goal of mine for a while now to start writing every day, but I needed something to write about. Last week I found what I feel is the perfect motivation. 101 Books We Can’t Live Without  from Daily Candy. I'll be reading and writing about books from a large portion of this list over the next year. 

Why did I choose this list? I need a bit of a challenge. I need some reason to start reading and writing every day. I found this link through Penguin USA’s Facebook & was immediately intrigued by the books on this list. I feel it’s a great mix of classics and modern literature… and even some just flat out fun reads (i.e. Sookie Stackhouse) in the mix.

I have read about 38 of these titles and own even more, but I am going to go back and re-read some of the ones that I "read" during high school. Because sometimes I didn't really fully read those books. :) You know what I'm talking about. 

I’m really excited to start this journey and hope that you’ll come along for the ride! And hopefully by the end of all this, I’ll have created my own 101 Books I Can’t Live Without.