Ever since I began the 50 in 52 Project Reading Challenge, a read-a-thon fundraiser for RAINN.org, folks have asked me which authors almost made the list of 50 books. Excellent question! It took about a month to settle on the 50 books, because I wanted to create a literary journey for myself. But with space being limited, I had to cut Updike, Rushdie, Roth, The Color Purple, and more. So here is a list of 50 books that didn’t make the cut for one reason or another.
But real quick: there’s 10 days left in this read-a-thon fundraiser!
To sponsor me and pledge a $ amount per book read, please go HERE.
To make a one-time donation, please go HERE.
For more info, go to the post pined to the top of the 50 in 52 Project Facebook page. You can find the original list of 50 books there too!
To see all the 50 in 52 blog posts, go HERE.
The list of books that did not make the cut follows the same rules as the master list:
1. Only modern fiction, 1800-present: novels, novellas, short stories, short story collections, plays, & screenplays.
2. Only works written in English.
3. Only one work per author.
- Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (1819)
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (1826)
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (1848)
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (1890)
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892; a short story collection)
- Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)
- Peter and Wendy by J. M. Barrie (1911)
- The Moon and the Sixpence by W. Somerset Maugham (1919)
- Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson (1919; a short story cycle)
- Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe (1929)
- The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West (1939)
- Native Son by Richard Wright (1940)
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (1945)
- All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946)
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis (1950)
- The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow (1953)
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding (1954)
- A Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill (1956; a play)
- Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958)
- The Bell by Iris Murdoch (1958)
- The Once and Future King by T. H. White (1958; novels originally published 1938-1940)
- Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960)
- The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961)
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)
- Revolutionary Road (1961)
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (1962; a play)
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess (1962)
- The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John Le Carré (1963)
- The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter by Katherine Anne Porter (1965; a short story collection)
- Fifth Business by Robertson Davies (1970)
- The Complete Stories by Flannery O’Connor (1971; a collection of short stories)
- The Stories of John Cheever by John Cheever (1978; a short story collection)
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole (1980)
- Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (1981)
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker (1982)
- Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (1985)
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (1985)
- The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller (1986; a graphic novel)
- It by Stephen King (1986)
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides (1993)
- Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino (1994; a screenplay)
- American Pastoral by Phillip Roth (1997)
- Underworld by Don DeLillo (1997)
- The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (1999)
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (2001)
- Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro (2001; a short story collection)
- Atonement by Ian McEwan (2001)
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (2002)
- Little Children by Tom Perrotta (2004)
- Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
#50-in-52
#RAINN