The BBC recently stated that most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books listed below. I find this a little hard to believe, especially after I marked all the ones I had read. I mean, I know I like to read, but I thought everyone read the classics. I had to laugh when I got to the Russian authors. My dad had a large collection of those in the bookcases at home and I would resort to them when I was finished with my library books. I think I made it through all of them on his shelf before I left home.
Here's the list:
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (x)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (x)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (x)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (parts)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x2)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (x, I read this in 1977 and it scared the crap out of me! I thought it could all still happen, hey I was 12!)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (not sure)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (x)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (prolly half of these)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x 2, first time at age 8)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (x)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (x2, first time at age 10)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x) (and everything else he wrote)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (x) (and everything else he wrote)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (not this one, but others by him)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (x) (and a bunch of others by him)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (x)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (x)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (x)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (half of these)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x2)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (x)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (x, thought this was the best book I had ever read at the time)
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 (x) (and a ton of others by her)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (I have this on my pile to read right now)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (x)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (x)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (x)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (tried to read this and just couldn't do it)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (x)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (may have, can't remember for sure)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (tried and couldn't)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (may have, not sure)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (read others by him and love him)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (oh lord, tried and couldn't)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (x)
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 (x read it and acted in the play twice with a professional company)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (x)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (x)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (x2)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (tried and couldn't, does that make me a bad person?)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (x)
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 (x, took me three months. might be the longest I ever spent on one book)
You realize that now the rest of them have to go on my list of books to read...right?
Took you 3 months to read Les Miserables?? Must have been the abridged version. Being the one who always has to do things the hard way, I got the unabridged version. Fucker took me a year!!! I'd read a paragraph on 17th century French politics and I was out like a light. Funny, though. Not much insomnia that year!
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No I read the unabridged version and obviously I had a LOT of time to read back then. I had been invited to see the musical at the Kennedy Center and I wanted to have a clue as to what the story was, so I slogged through it. I remember that year that you carried it around!
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