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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
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