Caviar Club

Caviar Club
You’re at a cocktail party, and someone says, “You’ve read Catcher in the Rye, haven’t you?” If you admit you haven’t, everyone will stare at you and the room will go silent. Even the lounge musicians will stop playing. So here’s the corpus, all the books written in English you should have read, not necessarily because they’re good, rather because you don’t want to admit not having read them when asked at cocktail parties. Clicking on a title will take you to the book’s Amazon page. Send comments and suggestions for additions and deletions to lascauxreview at gmail dot com.

Little Women by Louisa May Alcott

Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou

Foundation by Isaac Asimov

Nightfall and Other Stories by Isaac Asimov

The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen

Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin

The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow

Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow

The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce

Dandelion Wine by Ray Bradbury

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

The Works of Anne Bradstreet

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck

The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer

And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie

2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane

E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962

Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Bleak House by Charles Dickens

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

The Complete Poems of Emily Dickenson

Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow

The Complete English Poems by John Donne

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol 1 by Arthur Conan Doyle

Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Novels and Stories, Vol II by Arthur Conan Doyle

Collected Poems 1909-1962 by T.S. Eliot

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner

Collected Stories of William Faulkner

Light in August by William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner

Ferlinghetti’s Greatest Poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Short Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald

This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

A Room With a View by E.M. Forster

The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged

Lord of the Flies by William Golding

Far From the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

The Return of the Native by Thomas Hardy

The House of the Seven Gables by Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller

A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway

The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway

The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway

The Best Short Stories of O. Henry

The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The Lottery and Other Stories by Shirley Jackson

The Ambassadors by Henry James

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James

The Turn of the Screw by Henry James

The Wings of the Dove by Henry James

From Here to Eternity by James Jones

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce

Dubliners by James Joyce

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce

Ulysses by James Joyce

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

John Keats: The Complete Poems

Carrie by Stephen King

Different Seasons: Four Novellas by Stephen King

Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle

Arrowsmith by Sinclair Lewis

Main Street by by Sinclair Lewis

The Call of the Wild by Jack London

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Selected Poems

The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Paradise Lost by John Milton

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor

1984 by George Orwell

Animal Farm by George Orwell

The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

The Collected Poems by Sylvia Plath

Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Anthem by by Ayn Rand

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling

The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger

The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg

Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley

Shelley: Poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley

The Jungle by Upton Sinclair

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

East of Eden by John Steinbeck

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson

Dracula by Bram Stoker

Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe

The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

Sophie’s Choice by William Styron

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift

Selected Poems by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

Walden and Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau

The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain

The Complete Short Stories of Mark Twain

The Complete Humorous Sketches and Tales of Mark Twain

John Updike: Collected Early Stories

John Updike: Collected Later Stories

Collected Poems: 1953-1993 by John Updike

Rabbit, Run by John Updike

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut

Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut

The Color Purple by Alice Walker

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace

All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren

The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton

Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton

The Once and Future King by T.H. White

Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman

The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde

The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf

Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe

You Can’t Go Home Again by Thomas Wolfe