Back in the States. I have actually gone up to my book depository and simply sat there admiring them. I missed having my books for those 8 months. This means I better jump on the bandwagon I've been seeing around the Interwebs and put up the list of the top 100 books that's been floating around.
Everybody is supposed to do post this on their blog for reasons unknown to me. I just wanted to show off that I read more than half of them. The Big Read says that US adults have only read an average of 6 books on this list.
The Legend:
Read it
Favorite
Started it
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 (great movie too)
6. The Bible (I don’t want to ruin the ending but the bad guys lose)
7.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (see
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 (the funniest book I know)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the
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.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (my parents got all of our names from this book)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (we read these together out loud after dinner for a long time)
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 (I stole it from a nice little restaurant in
40. Winnie the Pooh -
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code -
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (one of the best I know if you can keep the names straight, it gets tough as he travels through a few generations of a family where every male has the same name as his father and grandfather)
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (I like Irving but he repeats his themes way too much, enough about wrestling, open marriages and the guy letting the animals out of the Vienna zoo in WWI only to get eaten by the lion)
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (a master of characterization)
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (second worst book on the list)
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 - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (another great movie, I love Peter Sellers)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (with the only opium induced wet dream I have ever read, three greek godess statues coming to life sounds pretty great to me)
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (captured the go go go spirit of the 50’s in Neal Cassady, I liked his Dharma Bums best which captured the spirit of the 60’s in Gary Snyder)
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' 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
74. Notes From A
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (for some reason we have three copies of this depressing book floating around our house, who keeps buying it?)
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 Mitchell
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 (another master of characters with an amazing eye for the details of
87.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (gets a little repetitive)
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 (inspired the wonderful Redwall series)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (a damn funny book published after the kid who wrote it died and his mother got lucky enough to find an editor who bothered to read the manuscript that turned out to be quite clever)
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
7 comments:
Welcome back, give a shout sometime
Dad gave me The Bell Jar on Christmas morning when I was fourteen. Life has kinda been down hill since.
Oh quit your whining. It's only by comparing our lives to the truly miserable that we gain perspective.
I believe I was told this would "Build Character" ... which as history notes, was a complete and utter failure
Leave the cows out of this.
Hi Lex--
I posted this list on my blog too. Welcome back.
I always remember you whining about "nothing to read in the John Beck elementary library." Then Mrs. H. recommended reading the entire Newbery medal list and you were hooked. We couldn't believe you actually made it through the Story of Mankind. Found some new things to try on your list but was disappointed not to see any Kurt Vonnegut (my favorite author) Jane S-former library aide
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