Reading list

I stole this from Monique Fullmer:"I read on another blog that the average adult has read only 6 out of 100 of the following books! (I don't know if those stats are true, but I guess it doesn't matter)."

I Googled 100 books you should read and got 13,500,000 hits. I guess there are a lot of different opinions on which books should be on the list. I have highlighted those I have read (49 in all). Some many years ago. How many of these have you read?

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (awesome - one of my favorite)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I love SciFi)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (great book)
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Excellent read, great life lessons and the movie is wonderful)
6. The Bible (once from cover to cover)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I bet I read this a dozen times in high school)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (totally kewl book)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (high school)
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (Love it. Have a set of these books my grandmother gave me)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (high school)
14. Complete work of Shakespere (have read many of them and love them)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (Love it)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (great book)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (high school)
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (movie makes text easier to visualize)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (depressing)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (painfully long, a laborious read)
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Not as good as I thought it would be)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (This is a painful read. The copy I have has annotations in the margins written by my grandmother for her book club)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (love it-when I read it I always think I will be able to figure out if it was a dream or real, never have been able to)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (high school)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (boring, wouldn't recommend it)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (high school)
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen (couldn't put the book down)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Who doesn't like Winnie the Pooh?)
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell (high school)
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Love it)
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (Can you tell I am a romantic?)
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (and I liked the movie too)
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (high school)
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert (Better than the movie)
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (kind of slow and repetitive)
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (high school)
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (skip over some of the descriptive stuff and it is good)
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (great book)
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fiedling (was that a book too?)
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdi
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (high school)
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (high school)
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (excellent book and I love the movie too)
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce (Painfully long)
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (a great book, but not so fun to read out loud)
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker (can't stand the pain in this book)
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (high school)
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (okay, but not totally inspiring as I expected it to be)
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Love Sherlock Holmes)
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams (sorry, I thought this was stupid)
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (better than all the movies they made of it)
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Read every word loved the book-- well except some of the war fighting scenes. hated the play)
99. Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton (high school)
100. Twilight series - Stephanie Myers (how did this get on the list of great books? I liked it okay, but don't consider it one of the "great" books)

Comments

Becky said…
I have read 35 all the way through, a handful of others partially, and most of the ones I haven't read are because I have made a conscious choice not to read them.

#1 is a favorite of mine that I have read many times. I have read #2, read #3 at least 5 times, read all of #4, read #5 about twice, read the Bible many times (only once cover to cover), read #7 twice (once for high school and once for college) and didn't like it either time, read #10 twice (prefer the original ending), read #11 more times than I can remember and probably have parts memorized--a personal favorite (I've also read all of Alcott's other books), read many of Shakespeare's works but not all, read #15, read #16 (it's my favorite of the Tolkien books), read #21 and #22 and started #23, read #27 (yuck!), read #29 many times along with Through the Looking Glass, read #30 in elementary school, started #32, read all of #33 and highly recommend them--they are some of my all-time favorite books, read #34 many times (another fave), read #35 and 39 and 40, read the entire set of #45 so many times they are dog-eared (plus many more of that author's books), #53 is another favorite, read #56 and 60, unfortunately I read #66 for an English lit class (double yuck), read #69 and started #70, read #72 (love her books!), read #86 multiple times, read #88--love English murder mysteries (prefer Agatha Christie), read #90 and 93, read #97 (love Roald Dahl and think that the BFG is his best book ever--we are currently reading it out loud to our kids), started #98--saw the musical in London and adored it--one of my favorites, I have read the first three of #100 and just started the newest one in the series.

Does it count that I re-read the good ones? :)

Popular posts from this blog

Holey Joes--Tuesday Tip

WORD: The Home Tab/Ribbon