1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, all the tragedies. and some comedies. And lots of sonnets.]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Thursday, March 5, 2009
How Many Have You Read?
Becca posted this list on our book club blog. It is a BBC list of 100 Top Reads. It said that the average person has read 6. I highlighted the ones I've read in red. How many have you read? I still have lots of work to do.
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8 comments:
I've read 33 completely and 8 partially because I didn't want to finish if I didn't like it.
P.S. Some of those books absolutely should not be on there! They were horrible. Take that Bill Shakespeare and James Joyce.
There are many that I know really well but can't remember if I actually read the book, watched the movie, or have just heard the story lots of times. Does anyone relate to this? So my number may be flawed. Also, I've only partially read a few (like the Hobbit. I CANNNOT get into that one... as much as I'd like to).
I read The Color Purple just yesterday. It's fantastic... though I couldn't recommend it to just anyone. Read page 1 and you'll understand what I mean. It's really RAW. I don't know how to explain it otherwise. No sugar coating... just bluntly honest about life- the good and the incredibly-detailed bad.
Anyway- I THINK my number is 26 (including 7 not-sures and 5 partials).
Apparently I have some reading to do. I have only read 11, that I am sure of. Like Becca, there are some that I am not sure whether I have actually read them or not. Matt on the other hand did really well. He has read 30 and is in the process of reading another 1.
Forty-two, not counting partial reads, kids versions, or movies.
There were some books I was pleasantly surprised to see on the list (Life of Pi, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), and some that I was very dismayed to see (The Da Vinci Code). What I was most surprised about was how many books on that list I've never heard of.
As a side note, I'm sure there are books that only showed up because it was the BBC list -- self-promoting Brits.
Ok, I just have to say that all of the Thomas Hardy books are completely depressing. So there. I didn't even want to see the movies of the books, even if they were shorter than the book. Other than that, on first glance, I have only about 29 I think. Most of the really depressing ones were books I read in college. Go English Dept. Sheesh. How did I survive that without happy pills?
Andy checked the list and counted 15 he'd read. I tried really hard to get him to read One Hundred Years of Solitude last year, and he only read part and hated it, so that's 1/2. I counted 40 that I'd read, but several of those were ones I didn't finish all the way YET. I'm still trying to finish Anna Karenina....for years now. One really interesting book on that list if you haven't read it that I'm a fan of is A Fine Balance by Rohan Mistry. sooo interesting. I hope Becca has read Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier, it's such a winner!
22ish finished for me. I'm impressed and intimidated by those who doubled my count. Wow!
Great list...although you MUST read Memoirs of a Giesha. Very good book!
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