Regular Rumination

***** – Drop everything and read this now!
****   – Put this in your TBR pile.
***     – Give it a shot.
**       – Eh.
*         – Avoid at all costs OR read just to see how bad it is.

1. The Historian – Elizabeth Kostova  *****
2. The Brief History of the Dead – Keven Brockmeier  ***
3. Hopscotch – Julio Cortázar  ***
4. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie  ****
5. The Hours – Michael Cunningham  *****
6. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller   ****
7. Go – John Clellon Holmes ***
8. On the Road – Jack Kerouac  **
9. The Double – José Saramago  ***
10. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley  ****
11. Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami  ***
12. Junky – William S. Burroughs  ***
13. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey  ****
14. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test – Tom Wolfe  ****
15. The World According to Garp – John Irving  ****
16. On Beauty – Zadie Smith  ***
17. Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut  ****
18. The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again) – Andy Warhol ***
19. The Book of Lost Things – John Connolly ****
20. The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho  **
21. Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth – Chris Ware  ****
22. Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides  *****
23. To Feel Stuff – Andrea Seigel  ***
24. Enduring Love – Ian McEwan   ***
25. Silas Marner – George Eliot  ***
26. Labyrinth – Kate Mosse ***
27. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov  ****
28. Blindness – José Saramago *****
29. SCUM Manifesto – Valerie Solanas  *
30. Twelfth Night – Shakespeare  ****
31. Hip: The History – John Leland  ***
32. Dracula – Bram Stoker  ****
33. Word Freak – Stefan Fastis  ***
34. The Archivist – Martha Cooley  ***
35. I Am Charlotte Simmons – Tom Wolfe   **
36. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel  ***
37. The Book of Illusions – Paul Auster  ***
38. The Story of Lucy Gault – William Trevor  **
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden  ***
40. The Girls – Lori Lansens  ****
41. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez  ****
42. Franny and Zooey – JD Salinger  ***
43. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – JK Rowling  ***
44. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson  *
45. Maps for Lost Lovers – Nadeem Aslam  ***
46. Little Children – Tom Perrotta  ***
47. Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco  **
48. Hidden Camera – Zoran Zivkovic  ***
49. Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami  ***
50. After the Quake – Haruki Murakami  *****
51. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami  ****
52. Salt: A World History – Mark Kurlansky  ***
53. The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera  ****
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen  ***
55. The Cider House Rules – John Irving  ****
56. The Basque History of the World – Mark Kurlansky  ***
57. About a Boy – Nick Hornby  ***
58. The Art of Love – Ovid  ***
59. The Art of Courtly Love – Andreas Cappellanus  ***
60. The Lais of Marie de France – Marie de France  ***
61. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini  ***
62. City of God – EL Doctorow  ***
63. The Remains of Day – Kazuo Ishiguro *****
64. Prodigal Summer – Barbara Kingsolver ****
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou  *****
66. Bel Canto – Anne Patchett  ****
67. Cold Mountain – Charles Frazier  ***
68. The Lost Language of Cranes – Daniel Leavitt  ****
69. The Human Stain – Philip Roth  ***
70. Fingersmith – Sarah Waters  ***
71. A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami  ***
72. Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman - Haruki Murakami  ***
73. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly – Jean-Dominique Bauby  ****
74. Persepolis – Marjane Satrapi  *****
75. Love is a Mix Tape – Rob Sheffield  ****