Special thanks to Chessa over at Ciao, Chessa for the inspiration for this post. I don't know the source of her list, but according to Chessa, "the National Endowment for the Arts estimates that the average adult in the United States has only read 6 out of the 100 books they've listed below.
Here's my version of the list. Here are the instructions:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize AND BOLD the books you LOVE.
3) Just italicize those you intend to read.
Okay...here goes:
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 (I've only read the first one and need to read the others. But first, I need to reread the first one to refresh my memory).
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (it's one of my top 10 favorites)
6. The Bible (not all of it but a significant portion)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (I'm sure I'd like it more now that I'm older)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (this has been in my bookcase for years--we're talking middle school here--and I've never read it)
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read a good portion of his plays and sonnets, but not all of them)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger (one of my favorite books in high school and is still a favorite)
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I tried reading this in the 8th grade and never made it past page 10...or was it page 5?)
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 (many people have told me I should read this one)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I preferred the Disney version; the original was just too weird when I first read it...but then again, if I read it now I may feel differently)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I've got this in my bookcase)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Another one in my bookcase that I haven't gotten around to reading yet)
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 (All together now..."Beasts of England, Beasts of Ireland...")
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I've had a lot of people tell me to read this one as well)
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 (Faithful readers of this blog are aware of my adoration for Anne)
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 - Mark Haddon (OMG, I MUST post a review on this!!! This book is simply amazing!!!)
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’ Diary - Helen Fielding (Sister Kitten named one of her cats after the Shazzer character)
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 (Another book I need to review! I read it for the first time last spring and absolutely adored it!)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (Bill Bryson is one of my favorite authors!)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola (I read this in college--in French!)
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (amazing how many people have seen all of the tv, movie, and theatrical versions but have never, ever picked up the book)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (I read this in college--in French--as well).
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White (this became one of my top 10 favorites when my second grade teacher read this to us...oh, I feel another "Book That Changed My Life" post coming on!
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 (I first read the English version when Nickelodeon had an animated series based on this book, and a lot of the material was over my head. When I read it in French, when I was a junior in high school, I was amazed that our public library even considered it a children's book.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (I have a friend who insists I should read this, but I can't get past the bunnies.)
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 (my second grade teacher read this one aloud, too).
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I guess I feel obligated, but since I love the musical so much, I'll just keep making comparisons).
OK, so I just counted the ones in bold and I've read 26 of these books. That's a little more than a fourth of those that are listed, but I didn't count the ones that are simply italicized. I have to thank my high school teachers for contributing to this list; if it weren't for them, I wouldn't have read a lot of these books, like the Dickens ones, on my own!
And...I just realized that I haven't put some of these books on my Library Thing bookshelf yet! Off I go!
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
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3 comments:
Da Vinci Code is one of my favs!
Don't watch the movie though-totally ruins it.
Secret Garden was one that I read over and over and over growing up. I should dig it out and read it again for nostalgia!
I really can't believe it took me so long to discover Secret Garden. It is such a lovely book. Your heart really, really aches for Mary Lennox. The descriptions of the flowers are so beautiful!
I got the idea from another blogger:) we all inspire each other! thanks for the link...
have a great weekend!
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