When my son Luke started reading in
earnest—that is, when he found that he had made his way through enough
contemporary fantasy novels to fill the libraries of Rivendell and Hogwarts—I
began to suggest some older classics.
He had already read the three
books in the Lord of the Rings
trilogy, including The Two Towers,
which was his favorite one. How about Jules Verne, I said. Around the World in Eighty Days or Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. Then I got him hooked on
Sherlock Holmes, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four. For good measure, I led him to Agatha Christie’s
classic And Then There Were None.
See a pattern? We at the Why Not100 obviously treasure the written word, but there sure are a lot of classics
with numbers in the title, whether it’s 1984,
Seven Years in Tibet, or North Dallas Forty. Hence, the following
list.
Only once, as you’ll see, do we
reference Janet Evanovich, who has written twenty numbered Stephanie Plum
mysteries—from One for the Money, Two for
the Dough, and Three to Get Deadly to
Explosive Eighteen, Notorious Nineteen, and Takedown Twenty.
You may also notice, when you get
to number 50, that a certain erotic novel didn’t make the cut.
1. One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest (Ken
Kesey)
2. A Tale of Two Cities (Charles
Dickens)
3. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre
Dumas)
4. The Sign of the Four (Arthur
Conan Doyle)
5. High Five (Janet Evanovich)
6. Six Years (Harlan Coben)
7. Seven Years in Tibet (Heinrich
Harrer)
8. The Eight (Katherine Neville)
9. Nine Lives to Die (Rita Mae
Brown)
10. Ten Little Ladybugs (Melanie
Gerth)
11. Eleven Birthdays (Wendy Mass)
12. Twelve Years a Slave (Solomon
Northup)
13. Thirteen Reasons Why (Jay
Asher)
14. Fourteen (Peter Clines)
15. Fifteen Minutes (Karen
Kingsbury)
16. Sixteen Cows (Lisa Wheeler)
17. At Seventeen (Gerri Hill)
18. Eighteen Summers (Jessie M)
19. Nineteen Minutes (Jodi Picoult)
20. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the
Sea (Jules Verne)
21. The Twenty-One Balloons (William
Pene du Bois)
22. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
23. Twenty-Three Tales (Leo
Tolstoy)
24. The Twenty-Four Days Before
Christmas (Madeleine L’Engle)
25. Twenty-Five (Rachel L. Hamm)
26. Twenty-Six Roses (Tamara Vann)
27. Twenty-Seven Bones (Jonathan
Nasaw)
28. Twenty-Eight and a Half Wishes (Denise
Grover Swank)
29. The Rabbi and the Twenty-Nine
Witches (Marilyn Hirsh)
30. Thirty Seconds (Heather MacPherson)
31. Thirty-One Dates in Thirty-One Days
(Tamara Duricka Johnson)
32. Thirty-Two Going on Spinster (Becky
Monson)
33. Thirty-Three Teeth (Colin
Cotterill)
34. The 34th Degree (Thomas
Greanias)
35. Stranger on Route Thirty-Five (Leslie
Sansom)
36. Thirty-Six Hours (Allison
Brennan)
37. Thirty-Seven (Maria Beaumont)
38. Thirty-Eight Nooses (Scott W.
Berg)
39. The Thirty-Nine Steps (John
Buchan)
40. North Dallas Forty (Peter Gent)
41. Forty-One Jane Doe’s (Carrie
Olivia Adams)
42. Forty-Two (M. Thomas Cooper)
43. Forty-Three Septembers (Jewelle
Gomez)
44. Forty-Four (Jools Sinclair)
45. Forty-Five (Bill Drummond)
46. Forty-Six Pages (Scott Liell)
47. Forty-Seven Kisses (Victoria
Grant)
48. Forty-Eight X (Barry Pollack)
49. The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas
Pynchon)
50. The Fifty Year Sword (Mark Z.
Danielewski)
51. Fifty-One Tales (Edward J.M.D.
Plunkett)
52. Fifty-Two Pickup (Elmore
Leonard)
53. Fifty Three (Rosanita Ratcliff)
54. Fifty-Four (Wu Ming)
55. Fifty-Five Graves (Robert P.
Maroney)
56. Fifty-Six Men (Fred Placke)
57. The Fifty-Seven Lives of Alex
Wayfare (M.G. Buehrlen)
58. The Folks at Fifty-Eight (Michael
Patrick Clark)
59. Fifty-Nine in ’84 (Edward
Achorn)
60. The House of Sixty Fathers (Meindert
DeJong)
61. Highway 61 (William McKeen)
62. Highway 62 Revisited (Matt Maxwell)
62. Highway 62 Revisited (Matt Maxwell)
63. 11/22/63 (Stephen King)
64. The Sixty-Four Sonnets (John
Keats)
65. The Sixty-Five Years of Washington (Juan
Jose Saer)
66. Sixty-Six Chances (Nick Buxton)
67. Sixty-Seven Poems for Downtrodden
Saints (Jack Micheline)
68. The Sixty-Eight Rooms (Marianne
Malone)
69. Sixty-Nine Inches and Rising
(Rebecca Steinbeck)
70. The Book of Seventy (Alicia
Suskin Ostriker)
71. Seventy-One Days: The Media Assault
on Obama (Michael Jason Overstreet)
72. Seventy-Two Hour Hold (Bebe
Moore Campbell)
73. Seventy-Three Poems (e.e.
cummings)
74. Seventy-Four Seaside Avenue (Debbie
Macomber)
75. Seventy-Five Pretzels: A New York
Tale (Michael Marzi)
76. Seventy-Six Days on Mars (Michael
Redman)
77. Seventy-Seven Shadow Street
(Dean Koontz)
78. Seventy-Eight Days (Ciara
Howard)
79. Seventy-Nine Park Avenue (Harold
Robbins)
80. Around the World in Eighty Days
(Jules Verne)
81. Eighty-One Miles: Best Loved Poems
(Shane Windham)
82. Eighty-Two Desire (Julie Smith)
83. Eighty-Three Lost Sheep (Gerry
Stoltzfoos and Shawn Smucker)
84. 1984 (George Orwell)
85. Eighty-Five Days: The Last Campaign
of Robert Kennedy (Jules Witcover)
86. 86’d (Dan Fante)
87. The Ghosts on 87th Lane (M.L.
Woelm)
88. Eighty-Eight (A.L. McAuley)
89. Eighty-Nine Pounds (Lauren
Groff)
90. The
Ninety and Nine (Vinny DiGirolamo)
91. Ninety-One Days (Lindsay
Luterman)
92. Ninety-Two in the Shade (Thomas
McGuane)
93. Ninety-Three (Victor Hugo)
94. Ninety-Four Maidens (Rhonda
Fink-Whitman)
95. Ninety-Five Theses (Martin
Luther)
96. The 96th Annual Apple
Valley Barn Dance (Jason F. Wright)
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