10 Books To Save Humanity!!

First, a note on methodology. I Googled "100 greatest books of all time" and Google, in its infinite wisdom (who am I to argue with Google?) assumed that I meant the 10 greatest novels of all time and led me to this page: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction. From that list, I selected the ones that I had actually read (and could actually recommend). Coincidentally there were ten, conveniently eliminating the need for any complex mathematical manipulation.The list:

1. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
2. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
3. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
4. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
5. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
6. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
7. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
10. The Lord Of The Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

The footnotes:I read all of those books in high school. That shouldn't lead anybody to the conclusion that I haven't read anything since. (It might mean, for example, that nothing good has been written since I was in high school.)If I was limited to one Buchan, I would probably make it Greenmantle instead.For reasons which remain obscure, the list doesn't include my favourite book of all time, Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

You see it as a problem. I see taking charge of our own destiny as our greatest strength.

The only ones in your twenty that I've read are The Lord of the Rings which I already mentioned and Catch-22 which I didn't like. I like the idea of "catch-22" but I think Heller should have stopped there.