In my effort to read new books and gain insight into the various mysteries on ABC’s LOST, I read the books that were seen or referenced on the show, proceeding on the assumption that the books were included because of the clues they provided as well as the way they interacted with the show’s themes and not just because any given book was what the propmaster had on the truck when an actor needed something to do with his hands.
Here’s a list of what I read with links to the posts about the books. Some books appeared in more than one season. I’ve organized them by first appearance. Some were referenced and some actually shown and/or discussed. I believe the latter were the more important ones and so I’ve marked them with a *.
Here are my reflections on “The End.”
Season 1
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll *
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding
- Watership Down – Richard Adams *
- A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle *
Season 2
- Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. – Judy Blume *
- Bad Twin – Gary Troup *
- The Brothers Karamazov – Fyodor Dostoevsky *
- The Epic of Gilgamesh – Herbert Mason (tr.)
- Island – Aldous Huxley
- Lancelot – Percy Walker *
- “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” – Ambrose Bierce *
- Our Mutual Friend – Charles Dickens *
- The Third Policeman – Flann O’Brien *
- The Turn of the Screw – Henry James *
- The Wizard of Oz – L Frank Baum *
Season 3
- A Brief History of Time – Stephen Hawking *
- Carrie – Stephen King *
- Catch-22 – Joseph Heller *
- Evil Under the Sun – Agatha Christie *
- The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand *
- Laughter in the Dark – Vladimir Nabokov *
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck *
- On Writing – Stephen King
- Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Through the Looking Glass – Lewis Carroll
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Season 4
- VALIS – Philip K Dick *
- The Invention of Morel – Adolfo Bioy Casares *
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
- Slaughterhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
- The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
- Survivors of the Chancellor – Jules Verne *
Season 5
- The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- Ulysses – James Joyce *
- A Separate Reality – Carlos Castaneda *
- Everything that Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor *
Season 6
- Fear and Trembling – Søren Kierkegaard *
- Haroun and the Sea of Stories – Salman Rushdie *
- Deep River – Shusaku Endo *
- The Chosen – Chaim Potok *
- Notes from Underground – Fyodor Dostoevsky *