Recently I saw a post by A life in books listing her “100-Book-Library”, which was inspired by Paula’s post from Book Jotter. Well, since I’ve seen and subsequently participated in these (very fun) list making activities such as the 20 Books of Summer Challenge (since revised to be this Updated Edition) and the I Spy Challenge, I thought why not? Why not focus my brain on creating more bookish lists instead of reading about world and/or provincial news? I’m having to do a lot of this lately because of the world/province of Ontario news!!!
Anyway, what is the 100-Book-Library all about? What does it mean? Paula was inspired by Will Schwable’s Books for Living and decided to create her own autobiography composed of books:
“If you own a copy of Will Schwable’s Books for Living, please turn to page 183 where you will find a chapter entitled ‘Song of Solomon: Admiring Greatness’. Here the author writes of a close friend who “loved books passionately” and “amassed a great collection” during his life. Upon reaching the age of 80, however, he decided to “keep exactly one hundred books” and no more. He proceeded to give away most of his voluminous library and remained true to his resolution for the rest of his days, He hung on only to those that held meaning for him and the rest were rehomed.
Schwable describes the one hundred books his friend left behind after his death as a “remarkable portrait of his life: an autobiography composed not of sentences but of books.”
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Should any of you wish to attempt this challenge, there are a few rules (well, suggestions):
a) You may add up to 100 books (fiction or non-fiction) to your figmental collection.
b) Titles may be added or removed at any point, but the number of individual books on your virtual shelf must never exceed 100, i.e. one in, one out. Alternatively, you may set the size of your library at (for instance) 50 or 30. The choice is entirely your own.
c) You can include an author’s collected works (or a series) on your shelf provided it has at some point genuinely been published in a single volume.
d) This isn’t meant to be a list of great titles or the most highbrow books you have read. Indeed, your choices don’t have to be particularly well-known. Please include only published works (it doesn’t matter if they are out of print) that have been significant to you in some way during your life. Books holding your most powerful memories.
e) Please include a link back to this post (I would love to know who, if anyone, takes on this challenge).
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My 100-Book-Library has been gleaned only from those books read recently in my adult years. I did not include any books from my childhood, teens or school-read books for the purposes of this particular list. What would this list of books say about me? I’m not really sure – I only know that this list holds books that have the most powerful memories and were ones that I genuinely loved, appreciated and that have had the greatest impact upon me as a reader. There are maybe only two or three non-fiction appearing in this list and it doesn’t hold any of the classics. I’m sure there are some in this 100 that could be replaced with others that may pop into my head at a later date, for sure, but for now this is the list I came up with at this moment: (100 books is a lot to list isn’t it?? ;-) )
There are quite a few on Susan / A life in books’ list that are on my TBR and I’m encouraged to see them there, it could very well mean I remove some from my list and replace them with those as I read them.
This list is also not in any order where my favourites are listed first, instead it was originally compiled in Excel and then sorted by gender. Therefore what is below is listed alphabetically by author’s first name and gender. I tried to add in other statistics so that I could perhaps produce pie-charts or something to visually express the 100. But I’m definitely not that savvy in figuring out how to do that. Instead, I’ll probably just list the tiny bit of statistics I entered so no visual gymnastics at all, sadly.
| Title | Author |
| The Dovekeepers | Alice Hoffman |
| The Lighthouse | Alison Moore |
| The Birth House | Ami McKay |
| The Red Tent | Anita Diamant |
| The Weight of Water | Anita Shreve |
| The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society | Annie Barrows / Mary Ann Shaffer |
| The Shipping News | Annie Proulx |
| Fall on Your Knees | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| The Way the Crow Flies | Ann-Marie MacDonald |
| Fin and Lady | Cathleen Schine |
| The Very Marrow of Our Bones | Christine Higdon |
| Mennonites Don’t Dance | Darcie Friesen Hossack |
| The Whipping Club | Deborah Henry |
| The Thirteenth Tale | Diane Setterfield |
| A Place Called Sorry | Donna Milner |
| An Unremarkable Body | Elisa Lodato |
| With No One as Witness | Elizabeth George |
| This Body of Death | Elizabeth George |
| Code Name Verity | Elizabeth Wein |
| To The Bright Edge of the World | Eowyn Ivey |
| Deafening | Frances Itani |
| People of the Book | Geraldine Brooks |
| The Summer Before the War | Helen Simonson |
| Mudbound | Hillary Jordan |
| All Our Worldly Goods | Irene Nemirovsky |
| A Dictionary of Mutual Understanding | Jackie Copleton |
| The Mapping of Love and Death | Jacqueline Winspear |
| Faith | Jennifer Haigh |
| The Homecoming of Samuel Lake | Jenny Wingfield |
| Glow | Jessica Maria Tuccelli |
| Latitudes of Melt | Joan Clark |
| The Trouble With Goats and Sheep | Joanna Cannon |
| And the Birds Rained Down | Jocelyne Saucier |
| The Buddha in the Attic | Julie Otsuka |
| Dracula in Love | Karen Essex |
| Life After Life | Kate Atkinson |
| My Notorious Life | Kate Manning |
| The Long, Hot Summer | Kathleen MacMahon |
| Mother, Mother | Koren Zailckas |
| Monsters of Templeton | Lauren Groff |
| Snow Flower and the Secret Fan | Lisa See |
| Shanghai Girls / Dreams of Joy | Lisa See |
| Heft | Liz Moore |
| Tigers in Red Weather | Liza Klaussmann |
| How The Light Gets In | Louise Penny |
| Alias Grace | Margaret Atwood |
| The Blind Assassin | Margaret Atwood |
| Crow Lake | Mary Lawson |
| Above Us Only Sky | Michele Young-Stone |
| All the Light There Was | Nancy Kricorian |
| The History of Love | Nicole Krauss |
| Glass Boys | Nicole Lundrigan |
| The Bird Sisters | Rebecca Rassmussen |
| The Silence of Bonaventure Arrow | Rita Leganski |
| A Tale for the Time Being | Ruth Ozeki |
| Bone and Bread | Saleema Nawaz |
| The Josephine Bonaparte Collection | Sandra Gulland |
| Tin Man | Sarah Winman |
| The Little Giant of Aberdeen County | Tiffany Baker |
| The Girls of Atomic City | Denise Kiernan |
| Cutting for Stone | Abraham Verghese |
| A Good American | Alex George |
| Remembrance | Alistair Macleod |
| Rules of Civility | Amor Towles |
| Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur Golden |
| Did You Ever Have a Family | Bill Clegg |
| The Power of One | Bryce Courtenay |
| Whitethorn | Bryce Courtenay |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
| The Secret Wisdom of the Earth | Christopher Scotton |
| The Thing About December | Donal Ryan |
| What Echo Heard | Gordon Sombrowski |
| Homesick | Guy Vanderhaeghe |
| Sutton | J.R. Moehringer |
| A History of Loneliness | John Boyne |
| The Absolutist | John Boyne |
| The Longest Trip Home | John Grogan |
| A Prayer for Owen Meany | John Irving |
| The Rain Before it Falls | Jonathon Coe |
| No Country | Kaylan Ray |
| Consumption | Kevin Patterson |
| And the Mountains Echoed | Khaled Hosseini |
| The Unlikely Redemption of John Alexander MacNeil | Lesley Choyce |
| The Bishop’s Man | Linden MacIntyre |
| Punishment | Linden MacIntyre |
| The Book Thief | Markus Zusak |
| The Blind Man’s Garden | Nadeem Aslam |
| The Prince of Tides | Pat Conroy |
| Under the Wire: Marie Colvin’s Last Assignment | Paul Conroy |
| The Snow Goose | Paul Gallico |
| Skippy Dies | Paul Murray |
| Clara Callan | Richard B Wright |
| The Narrow Road to the Deep South | Richard Flanagan |
| A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry |
| On Canaan’s Side | Sebastian Barry |
| No Man’s Land | Simon Tolkien |
| The Rise and Fall of Great Powers | Tom Rachman |
| I Know This Much Is True | Wally Lamb |
| A Land More Kind Than Home | Wiley Cash |
| Ordinary Grace | William Kent Kreuger |
What are some of the stats for my 100-Book-Library?
60% are written by female authors
22 are CanLit titles; 14 of which are by female authors
Sadly, only 9 out of 100 are written by diverse authors
There are a few authors that have more than one of their works on this list. Authors like Linden MacIntyre, John Boyne, Bryce Courtenay, Lisa See, Elizabeth George, and Ann-Marie MacDonald have two or more of their books listed. They are my go-to authors and ones that I know I can count on to provide solid and excellent reading experiences.
So there is my 100! What would your 100-Book-Library look like?
12 Comments
I’m so pleased you decided to join in. It’s fun, isn’t it. There are some titles on your list I found hard to let go such as the Bill Clegg, and we’ve overlapped with authors but chosen different titles which suggests I may well be picking up a few to add to my TBR list from your library. I’ve made a note to revisit mine in a year. Might you do the same?
Another very fun book list to ponder and create! The idea of revisiting in a year is an excellent one Susan! I may even break down the 100 to the ones that will never be taken off and show which ones have been removed and replaced!
What a great list! So many books I still have yet to read… and quite a few that I love, like Clara Callan and Alias Grace.
I like that you added some stats at the end. I’m curious to know what I would come up with, but the more lists I see the more I know that it would agonizing to try and decide what to put on and what to leave off. How long did it take you?
Thank you Naomi! It was kicking around in my head for a couple days after seeing Susan post hers….and there are books on there that are a given for me so those weren’t too hard to add immediately to the list. It started to get harder around the 60ish point I think, but the one wonderful thing I appreciate about those Goodreads Challenges is that it keeps track of the books I’ve read. I sorted those by rating and then went down the list and thought about the ones to include and the ones to dismiss.
So this was created with a great deal of assistance from Goodreads – otherwise, I would have (should have maybe?) gone and looked at my shelves at home. I wouldn’t be surprised if I ventured to look through the ones there that the list may change a bit?
I do like your list, Penny. Well done!
Life After Life and the two Margaret Atwood titles are great favourites of mine. The stats are a marvellous idea, too. Thank you so much for the link and mention.
Oh, I almost forgot to say: I have linked to your 100-Book-Library from the original post!
Thank you Paula for the link but for creating this very fun exercise!
This is such a fun idea. It is also going to consume my life until I figure out what my 100 books would be :P
Thank you so much for including the bit about Will Schwable’s book. Gives this project some wonderful context. It’s a pretty inspiring idea, actually, to limit your collection to 100 books. Probably pretty healthy. And I love the idea of “rehoming” books.
Thanks for doing this! You have a wonderful list. Excited to see Owen Meany and To the Bright Edge of the World, and two of my five favorite novels: I Know This Much is True and Skippy Dies. Sutton was a pleasant surprise! I really enjoyed that book, but not the type I would assume to see on a list like this. Nice :)
Thanks Rick! Paula created an obsessively fun exercise for sure!! haha yes, because after I saw this, it did consume my thoughts for a few days wondering what I would/should/could put on this list.
I thought Sutton had such fantastic storytelling!! I recommended and passed that book on to so many after I read it. Glad to see that many of the books I listed are your favourites too. :-) Thank you so much for taking the time to visit and comment! Looking forward to seeing your list!
Thanks for sharing this neat idea. I love the little story about the man who only kept 100 books once he turned 80. I hope I’ll be in a position to do the same! I did a similar post about a year ago where I tried to define my personal canon. I only had 15 books on that list. I will have to give some thought as to what I would pick if I was starting a lifelong list that could include 100 books important to me…
It was a neat idea and I can see my list changing over time, for some of the books on there anyway. And wouldn’t it be hard truly to only have 100 books at home? ;-) I’ll have to check out your personal canon Jenna!
See? Revisiting this list is probably a great idea….I already found one for sure that is missing from this list – the wonderful Carol Shields and The Stone Diaries is sadly absent from my list above. I knew I would find those left off the list when I started looking into my shelves at home. For the list above I relied solely on memory and then Goodreads to finish out the list.