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100 Excellent Books a Literate Australian Christian Could Possibly Read (If They Had Nothing Better To Do):

By Rod Benson (send your comments and suggestions to ).

I excluded "classical literature" (i.e. the really old stuff like Homer and Plato) and limited my nominations to one book per author (which meant, for example, cutting out Augustine's City of God in favour of his Confessions, and keeping Iris Murdoch's The Green Knight but not her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals - I slipped these titles in here instead!). The list below represents my suggestions based on my reading as at April 2003. Your list would probably be quite different from mine and equally valid. What's important is that we read good books, and read often.

FICTION

1. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim's Progress

2. A.S. Byatt, Possession

3. Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass

4. Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales

5. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

6. Don DeLillo, Underworld

7. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

8. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

9. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

10. Aldous Huxley, Brave New World

11. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

12. Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis

13. Sören Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

14. Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible

15. Matthew Kneale, English Passengers

16. D.H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley's Lover

17. Alex Miller, Conditions of Faith

18. Rohinton Mistry, A Fine Balance

19. Iris Murdoch, The Green Knight

20. Flannery O'Connor, The Complete Stories

21. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

22. Francois Rabelais, Gargantua and Pantagruel

23. Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

24. William Shakespeare, Collected Works

25. John Steinbeck, East of Eden

26. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels

27. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings

28. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

29. John Updike, A Rabbit Omnibus

30. Voltaire, Candide

POETRY

Collected poems of:

31. Emily Dickinson

32. Jamie Grant

33. Gwen Harwood

34. Gerard Manley Hopkins

35. Les Murray

36. Sylvia Plath

37. Dylan Thomas

38. R.S. Thomas

39. Walt Whitman

And these anthologies:

40. John Leonard (ed.), Seven Centuries of Poetry in English

41. The Metaphysical Poets (Penguin)

42. New Oxford Book of 18th Century Verse

43. New Oxford Book of 19th Century Verse

44. The Penguin Book of the Sonnet OR The Oxford Book of Sonnets

BIOGRAPHY

45. Augustine, The Confessions

46. Adrian Desmond & James Moore, Darwin

47. D.H. Donald, Lincoln

48. Timothy Dudley-Smith, John Stott [2 vols]

49. Martin Gilbert, Churchill: A Life

50. Peter Hebblethwaite, John XXIII: Pope of the Century

51. Adrian House, Francis of Assisi

52. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

53. William Martin, A Prophet With Honor [Billy Graham]

54. Thomas Merton, The Seven Storey Mountain

55. John Henry Newman, Apologia Pro Vita Sua

56. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Confessions

57. Stanley Wolpert, Gandhi's Passion

NONFICTION

58. Caroline Alexander, The Endurance

59. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God

60. David Bebbington, Patterns in History

61. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers From Prison

62. Colin Brown, Christianity and Western Thought

63. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion

64. D.A. Carson, The Gagging of God

65. Michael Cathcart, Manning Clark's History of Australia

66. G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

67. Richard Foster, Streams of Living Water

68. James Fowler, Stages of Faith

69. Jostein Gaardner, Sophie's World

70. Daniel Goleman, Working With Emotional Intelligence

71. Stanley Grenz, Theology for the Community of God

72. John Harris, One Blood

73. Roger Hurding, Pathways to Wholeness

74. Bill Hybels, Courageous Leadership

75. St John of the Cross, Selected Writings

76. Caroline Jones, An Authentic Life

77. Thomas á Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

78. Hans Kung, On Being a Christian

79. C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

80. Gordon MacDonald, Rebuilding Your Broken World

81. John Mallison, Mentoring

82. I. Howard Marshall, Kept By the Power of God

83. Ted Martin & Michael Cozzens (eds), Principles of Leadership

84. Mike Mason, The Gospel According to Job

85. Humphrey McQueen, The Essence of Capitalism

86. Henri Nouwen, The Wounded Healer

87. John Ortberg, The Life You've Always Wanted

88. Roy Oswald & Otto Kroeger, Personality Type and Religious Leadership

89. J.I. Packer, Knowing God

90. Blaise Pascal, The Pensees

91. John Piper, Future Grace

92. Bertrand Russell, History of Western Philosophy

93. James Sire, The Universe Next Door

94. John R.W. Stott, The Cross of Christ

95. Leonard Sweet, SoulTsunami

96. Derek Tidball, Builders and Fools

97. Robert Webber, Ancient-Future Faith

98. Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy

99. Philip Yancey, Soul Survivor

100. Carl Zimmer, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea