I came across this list, and I absolutely loved it.
It might take me a while to get everything linked, but I’m definitely assigning myself this homework!
Its fun to mark them as you go. I am adding a printable version of the list for you to download:
Kafka Was the Rage – Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
City of Night – John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao – Junot Díaz
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Iliad – Homer (translated by E.V. Rieu)
As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
Tadanori Yokoo – Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz – Alfred Döblin
Inside the Whale and Other Essays – George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains – Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art – James A. Hall
David Bomberg – Richard Cork
Blast – Edited by Wyndham Lewis
Passing – Nella Larsen
Beyond the Brillo Box – Arthur C. Danto
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind – Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle – George Steiner
Hawksmoor – Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self – R.D. Laing
The Stranger – Albert Camus
Infants of the Spring – Wallace Thurman
The Quest for Christa T. – Christa Wolf
The Songlines – Bruce Chatwin
Nights at the Circus – Angela Carter
The Master and Margarita – Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog – Saul Bellow
Puckoon – Spike Milligan
Black Boy – Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima
Darkness at Noon – Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land – T.S. Eliot
McTeague – Frank Norris
Money – Martin Amis
The Outsider – Colin Wilson
Strange People – Frank Edwards
English Journey – J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
The Day of the Locust – Nathanael West
1984 – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
The Fire Next Time – James Baldwin
A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
The Age of American Unreason – Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life – Fran Lebowitz
The Coast of Utopia – Tom Stoppard
The Bridge – Hart Crane
The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
The Portable Dorothy Parker – Dorothy Parker
The Trial – Franz Kafka
All the Emperor’s Horses – David Kidd
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea – Yukio Mishima
Tales of Beatnik Glory – Ed Sanders
Nowhere to Run – Gerri Hirshey
Before the Deluge – Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson – Camille Paglia
The American Way of Death – Jessica Mitford
Teenage – Jon Savage
Vile Bodies – Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders – Vance Packard
The Trial of Henry Kissinger – Christopher Hitchens
Maldoror – Comte de Lautréamont
On the Road – Jack Kerouac
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder – Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni – Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual – Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels – Elaine Pagels
The Leopard – Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Inferno – Dante Alighieri
A Grave for a Dolphin – Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult – Rupert Thomson
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Fingersmith – Sarah Waters
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
The Diamond as Big as the Ritz – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Lady into Fox – David Garnett
Orlando – Virginia Woolf
Seven Years in Tibet – Heinrich Harrer
The Spirit of Man – Robert Byron
The Man Who Fell to Earth – Walter Tevis
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter – Carson McCullers
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Hunger – Knut Hamsun
A Night to Remember – Walter Lord
The Outsider – Albert Camus
The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
We Have Always Lived in the Castle – Shirley Jackson
A People's Tragedy – Orlando Figes
The Story of Art – E.H. Gombrich
Lives of the Great Composers – Harold C. Schonberg
The Origin of the Species – Charles Darwin
A Season in Hell – Arthur Rimbaud
Interviews With Francis Bacon – David Sylvester