reading list...

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love. I think I made this clear by my comments.
4) Strike out (*) the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien more than once
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling well most of them...
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 I have read all three books. thanks.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare- Complete? no. How about more than most?
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-I own it. It was mom's. ok. I stole it.
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-How about the Idiot? I read that one.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll including Through the Loookingglass
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 why do they list the individual book as well as the series?
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-I watched it on TV?
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown* Rubbish
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 totally creeped me out senior year of high school when lots of news involving the Taliban was circulating. That was also the year of 9-11.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan- I saw the movie? The clothes weren't as great as I had hoped.
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 I wrote a paper on it.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas like 3 times. one of my faves
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 I wrote a paper on this too.
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* I think grand Christmas tradition has done this one in for me. I will read the rest of Dickens first.
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
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 Are there really people who haven't read this? Please don't tell me if you are one of these people and just go read it.
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

I've got 31 read, 18 I've never heard of and 3 I would not readily pick up. I consider myself a classic literature lover and most of these are classics but please note this is the top 100 list and not classics everyone should read.

I add The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane as the one book I was forced to read in school and hated. I even fell asleep during the movie.
I add Brothers Karamozov by Dostoyevsky, and Master and Margarita by Bulgokov to the list. I am particularly fond of russian literature as well.
Also The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. actually anything by Eco would be fine by me.

if it is a book and not total trashy trash I will probably give it a try if you recommend it to me. i don't like to rule out reading material of any kind.

What would you add? What do you hate?

The topic is open for discussion.



This is my bookcase. It has a hand buffed custom finish that shines like glass. I have another one for fashion specific books. I also have a ton of books still at my parents' house. I have been frequenting the library of late since I am poor and you can reserve online and not deal with the stupid Library of Congress system, but I digress. My loathe for the Library of Congress system is another post entirely. A lengthy one. And it has a geeky lisp.