From time to time, I see these lists of 100 books that everyone should read. These aren’t necessarily ones that everyone should read, but as a long-time reader with eclectic taste and a particular fondness for counterculture and other non mainstreams works, this list would constitute my 100, with one extra for good measure:

1. The four Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in the Holy Bible
2. The Acts of the Apostles in the Holy Bible
3. The Book of Ecclesiastes in the King James version of the Holy Bible
4. the most expansive major history of the state where you live
5. slave narratives from Library of Congress’s American Memory
6. Cultural Democracy by James Bau Graves
7. A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
8. “Culture and Anarchy” by Matthew Arnold (essay)
9. Still Life with Oysters and Lemon by Mark Doty
10. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
11. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
12. Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
13. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
14. Teaching to Transgress by bell hooks
15. The Elements of Style by Will Strunk and EB White
16. On Writing Well by William Zinsser
17. Absalom! Absalom! by William Faulkner
18. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
19. Light in August by William Faulkner
20. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
21. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
22. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
23. The Mind of the South by WJ Cash
24. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
25. “Sucker” by Carson McCullers (short story)
26. Walden by Henry David Thoreau
27. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
28. “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” by Langston Hughes (essay)
29. One Big Self: An Investigation by CD Wright
30. Macbeth by William Shakespeare
31. Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
32. The Tempest by William Shakespeare
33. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
34. Dracula by Bram Stoker
35. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
36. A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond by Percival Everett and James Kincaid
37. The Air-Conditioned Nightmare by Henry Miller
38. Tripmaster Monkey by Maxine Hong Kingston
39. The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
40. The Politics of Psychopharmacology by Timothy Leary
41. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
42. Desolation Angels by Jack Kerouac
43. Book of the Unknown by Jonathon Keats
44. The Stranger by Albert Camus
45. No Exit by Jean-Paul Sartre (one-act play)
46. Right You Are, If You Think You Are by Luigi Pirandello
47. A Walk with Love and Death by Hans Koning
48. Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray
49. The Long Haul by Myles Horton
50. “Dover Beach” by Matthew Arnold (poem)
51.  “Howl” by Allen Ginsberg (poem)
52. Black Boy by Richard Wright
53. Forty Acres and a Goat by Will D. Campbell
54. Blindness by Jose Saramago
55. “Earthquake in Chile” by Heinrich von Kleist (short story)
56. The Wretched of the Earth by Franz Fanon
57. Miguel Street by VS Naipaul
58. For Colored Girls by Ntozake Shange
59. Revolt of the Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta
60. Siddhartha by Herman Hesse
61. The Alchemist by Paolo Coehlo
62. The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-in-the-Moon Marigolds by Paul Zindel
63. The Buddha of Suburbia by Haneif Kureishi
64. Blue Highways by William Least-Heat Moon
65. John Henry Days by Colson Whitehead
66. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
67. . . . And the Earth Did Not Devour Him by Tomás Rivera
68. Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi
69. Working by Studs Terkel (interviews)
70. Rubyfruit Jungle by Rita Mae Brown
71. Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson
72. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
73. “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick (poem)
74. Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
75. “Poem for the Young White Man who asked me how I, an intelligent well-read person, could believe in the War Between Races” by Lorna Dee Cervantes (poem)
76. Dispatches by Michael Herr
77. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca
78. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House” by Audre Lorde (essay)
79. “Letter from the Birmingham Jail” by Martin Luther King, Jr.
80. The Piano Lesson by August Wilson
81. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone by August Wilson
82. Fences by August Wilson
83. Beloved by Toni Morrison
84. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
85. A Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neill
86. A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
87. Suddenly, Last Summer by Tennessee Williams
88. The Enlightened Heart: An Anthology of Sacred Poetry edited by Stephen Mitchell
89. Killers of the Dream by Lillian Smith
90. The Chosen by Chaim Potok
91. Living Poor by Moritz Thomsen
92. Road Scholar by Andrei Codrescu
93. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
94. The Rainbow by DH Lawrence
95. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevsky 
96. Dewdrops on a Lotus Leaf, poems by Ryokan
97. “If We Must Die” by Claude McKay (poem)
98. The Art of the Commonplace by Wendell Berry (essays)
99. Sundog by Jim Harrison
100. The Lives of a Poem by Richard Hague
101. “Where are you going? Where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates (short story)