Danielle's Challenge (Complete!)

Friends,



Danielle has issued forth another listing challenge. A list of 50 novels that I would wish to be saved from the murderous heart of George W. Bush and his wish to burn all books, and to be eternally available to all kinds.

The challenge has been floating out there for a couple days, so I'm going to post my list, albeit incomplete and in no particular order...I just wanted to get the out there, so it doesn't seem as if I'm dodging the task.

1. Jane Austen - Pride & Prejudice
2. Joseph Heller - Catch 22
3. John Steinbeck - Grapes of Wrath
4. Vladimir Nabokov - Lolita
5. Marilynne Robinson - Housekeeping
6. Toni Morrison - Beloved
7. Jack Kerouac - On the Road
8. Hunter S. Thompson - Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas*
9. Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse Five
10. Cervantes - Don Quixote
11. Mark Twain - Huckleberry Finn
12. Salman Rushdie - The Satanic Verses
13. Ray Bradbury - Farenheit 451 (I think this one is obvious)
14. F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby
15. James Dickey - Deliverance
16. Richard Russo - Nobody's Fool
17. Ken Kesey - One Flew Over's the Cuckoo's Nest
18. Alan Moore - Watchmen
19. J.D. Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
20. George Orwell - 1984
21. Aldous Huxley - Brave New World
22. William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury
23. Flannery O'Connor - Wise Blood
24. Michael Shaara - The Killer Angels
25. Philip Roth - Portnoy's Complaint
26. J.R.R. Tolkien - The Hobbit
27. E.B. White - Charlotte's Web
28. Gabriel Garcia Marquez- Love in the Time of Cholera
29. C.S. Lewis -The Screwtape Letters
30. Bram Stoker - Dracula
31. Jonathan Swift - Gulliver's Travels
32. Lewis Carroll - Alice in Wonderland
33. Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse
34. Larry McMurtry - Lonesome Dove
35. Gustave Flaubert - Madam Bovary
36. Albert Camus - The Stranger
37. Charles Dickens - Great Expectations
38. Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
39. Zadie Smith - White Teeth
40. Elmore Leonard - Get Shorty
41. Mark Danielewski - House of Leaves
42. Harper Lee - To Kill a Mockingbird
43. John Updike - Run, Rabbit
44. John Irving - The World According to Garp
45. Douglas Adams - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
46. Michael Chabon - The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
47. James Joyce - A Potrait for an Artist as a Young Man
48. Philip K. Dick - Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
49. Cormac McCarthy - Blood Meridian
50. Gunther Grass - The Tin Drum

Admittedly, I have not read all of the books on this list, nor do I own all of them, but if I'm responsible for saving all novels, I see the task as also creating a template for creating new novels, so I needed to make sure that it was obvious that anything can be written from pop novels to the most bizarre pieces of work you can imagine. I know I should work "The Joy Luck Club," or anything by Agatha Christie...and I am woefully short on female writer's and minority writers.

Also, in regards to Ande's list...I did not include The House on Mango Street or The Things They Carried because I'm pretty sure I'd be able to talk El Presidente into believing they are short story collections.

Viva libros!