Kimber the Magnificent here. Telling you about this poster we got awhile back: 100 Books Bucket List. Mom and I? We’ve read 81 of the titles listed. The rest? Who cares? And some titles on this puppy? They’re on our Super Duper Over-Rated Duds and Disses and Total Waste of Time, Off You Go to the Kitty Litter Box List*. (Mom’s version. I just call it our Yuck List.)

So We Did

Anywho. That poster thingy got one of us thinking. Mom, says I, Kimber the Genius. We can do better. Let’s make our own Bucket List. So we did.

Mom Tested, Kimber Approved

Below is our Mom Tested, Kimber Approved, 100% Unscientific, Totally Subjective 100 Books For Your Bucket List. As in, Good Stuff Here. Enjoyable. Enlightening. Inspiring. Entertaining. Thought-Provoking. Great writing. And Just Plain. Fun. Both fiction and nonfiction. 

Note: We’re not talkin’ all Hoity-Toity here. So relax, okay?

Some titles are newer than others. Most have been around awhile. Stood the test of time. You’ll find some well-worn “classics” that are probably on everyone’s “Best Books” list.  Some might surprise you. And a few are… Well. Hi, Mom.

We’ve also included some children’s literature. Hi again, Mom. By the way, we’re only including titles we’ve actually read. In case you’re wondering.

So here, without further ado or hullabaloo, is the Official Mom and Kimber version of 100 Books For Your Bucket List. As in, read these before you die and you can die happy, okay? In no particular order:

100 Books For Your Bucket List

1. The Bible
2. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
3. The Velveteen Rabbit – Margery Williams
4. Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds – Joy Adamson
5. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
6. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
7. The Book Thief – Markus Zusak
8. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
9. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
10. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
11. Cry, The Beloved Country – Alan Paton
12. Out of Africa – Isak Dinesen
13. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – Victor Hugo
14. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
15. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L. Frank Baum
16. The Sacred Romance – John Eldredge
17. The Hiding Place – Corrie ten Boom
18. Waking the Dead – John Eldredge
19. The Prayer of Jabez – Bruce Wilkinson
20. Through Gates of Splendor – Elisabeth Elliot
21. The Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis
22. The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring – J.R.R. Tolkien
23. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
24. Because of Winn Dixie – Kate DiCamillo
25. Silas Marner – George Eliot
26. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
27. Black Beauty – Anna Sewell
28. Animal Farm – George Orwell
29. 1984 – George Orwell
30. Winnie the Pooh (the complete collection) – A.A. Milne
31. Hamlet – Shakespeare
32. Uncle Tom’s Cabin – Harriet Beecher Stowe
33. Jane Eyre – Emily Bronte
34. The Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan
35. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
36. The Scarlett Letter– Nathaniel Hawthorne
37. The Giving Tree – Shel Silverstein
38. My Antonia – Willa Cather
39. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
40. Ben Hur – Lew Wallace
41. The Bronze Bow – Elizabeth George Speare (Newbery Winner)
42. Common Sense – Thomas Paine
43. A River Runs Through It – Norman Maclean (Pulitzer Finalist)
44. The Prince – Nicolo Machievelli
45. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
46. Peter Pan – J.M. Barrie
47. Bambi – Felix Salten (The original, not the Disney-fied version)
48. Tuck Everlasting – Natalie Babbitt
49. The Odyssey – Homer
50. One Thousand and One Nights: The Arabian Nights – R.F. Burton
51. The Red Badge of Courage – Stephen Crane
52. The Collected Stories of Washington Irving
53. Blueberries for Sal – Robert McCloskey
54. Aesop’s Fables
55. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
56. The Swiss Family Robinson – Johann Wyss 
57. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
58. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
59. The Diary of Anne Frank – Anne Frank
60. Ivanhoe – Sir Watler Scott
61. Call It Courage – Armstrong Sperry (Newbery winner)
62. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
63. The Killer Angels – Michael Shaara (Pulitzer winner)
64. Hans Christian Andersen’s Complete Fairy Tales – H.C. Andersen
65. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
66. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel – Virginia Lee Burton
67. The Indian in the Cupboard – Lynne Reid Banks
68. Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor Frankl
69. Alice in Wonderland  – Lewis Carroll
70. Unbroken: A WWII Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption– Laura Hillenbrand
71. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
72. Curious George Classic Collection – H.A. Rey
73. Soup – Robert Newton Peck
74. A Fine and Pleasant Misery – Patrick F. McManus
75. The Short Stories of O. Henry – O. Henry
76. Where the Red Fern Grows – Wilson Rawls
77. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
78. Spencer’s Mountain – Earl Hamner, Jr. (The novel that inspired The Waltons)
79. Where the Wild Things Are – Maurice Sendak (Caldecott winner)
80. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – Betty Smith
81. Hatchet – Gary Paulsen (Newbery winner)
82. The Nightingale – Kristin Hannah
83. The Great Alone – Kristin Hannah
84. Anne of Green Gales – L.M. Montgomery
85. The Bridge to Terabithia – Katherine Paterson (Newbery winner)
86. Babette’s Feast – Isak Dinesen
87. The Small Woman: The Heroic Story of Gladys Aylward – Alan Burgess
88. To Sir, With Love – E.R. Braithwaite
89. The Giver of Stars – Jojo Moyes
90. How Green Was My Valley – Richard Llewellyn
91. Shiloh – Phyllis Reynolds Naylor (Newbery winner)
92. Island of the Blue Dolphins – Scott O’Dell (Newbery winner)
93. I Am Still Alive – Kate Marshall
94. King of the Wind: The Story of the Godolphin Arabian – Marguerite Henry (Newbery Medal Winner)
95. The Little House series – Laura Ingalls Wilder
96. The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton
97. Babe, The Gallant Pig – Dick King-Smith
98. The Little Engine That Could – Watty Piper
99. Corduroy – Don Freeman
100. Goodnight Moon – Margaret Wise Brown
101. What would you add?

How many do you recognize?

* Can we agree here and now that Catcher in the Rye is one of the most over-rated books in the English language? And to the horror of high school English teachers everywhere, so are The Sound and the Fury, The Great Gatsby, and most Virginia Woolf entries. Ditto Marcel Proust. He’s the kind of author everyone talks about but few actually read. Cuz he’s as dense as a pea soup fog at midnight. As for James Joyce’s Ulysses? Gag me with catnip!