100 Books
September 24, 08 by anorris
I saw this on a blog I follow and thought it was fun considering our recent discussion about women, books, and reading….play along in the comments if you like.
The Big Read is a NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six. I have highlighted the titles that I have read…
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 (to be fair not sure I actually read it or only the cliff’s notes but I’m gonna count it-lol)
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
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 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
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
wow..and some were even penned by FEMALES!!!!! hee hee. I have read many, have seen the movies of many. I won’t try to write down all I’ve read. but would be a good list to start on! (except for Dickens- I don’t care if his books all rot!
I think I’ve read 41…..I actually own a set of Jane Austen’s..have seen the movies.
I had to read many for High School. What do they make kids read these days in high school? we had a list of 5-6 horribly difficult books to read over the summer in Catholic HS..it was a good idea in theory, but many of the books needed to be read while discussing in classroom situation. Thus, I may have read them, but hardly knew what I was reading- it’s not easy reading 5 books in one week before school started.
I have read 27 of the above titles, and I am actually surprised at some of the newer titles that made the list. Like Shirley, many of them I read for school. The Bell Jar was an interesting one I read on my own that I would only suggest to women or crazy people. ha.
I know that Lee and Mark have read many of these same titles as I base much of what I read on their recommendations.
As far as school goes, we all went through the Lakewood AP English program, which in my experience is very good comparative to all of my friends’ educations. (even Greg at St. Ignatius!)
This was a fun topic and many of the above books are on my books to read in a lifetime list. Unfortunately, Physics is kicking my but currently and wasting all my reading time. I have made zero progress since reading half of our current selection in one sitting.
Wow Alli, I am totally impressed… you read the entire Bible? I went through 8 years of Catholic school and we didn’t even come close!
Yah- I was surprised with that one too, Kelly! I tried to read it one year for Lent…didn’t get too far! all those “Begets” did me in. Have you seen any interesting baby deliveries?
yeah, in one of my many religion classes we read the bible pretty much from start to finish…if not all the way through, damn close. The sad thing for me is that I”ve only read 17 on that list and I think most of them occurred in the first 18 years of my life. I need to start reading again…
books I’ve read from the list I think you’ll like
#8, 19, 21 (my absolutely favorite book- have read 4 times!, 37, 41, 42, 44 (at Meg’s rec…her fav book), 48 (I thought you read in HS?), 49 (How did you get out of junior high w/o reading this? shame on Mr Summers! haha), 58, 59 (we listened on tape in car ride last summer- very good), 94
some of the difficult ones I wil llet you find out for yourself! ha..although I think I did enjoy Moby Dick.
I have read about 40 of them. Great, one more item on my to-do list: read 60 books!!
Then again, I can skip the ones by female authors, since they are, ostensibly, inferior to anything written by a man.
i read 32 of the listed books and have many more that should be on the list. who else read #14? haha.
women authors, bah.
well, I enjoy seeing Shakespeare on stage rather than reading it myself. Haven’t figured out how many I have seen ,but quite a number to date. I just finished Thirteen Moons by same guy who wrote Cold Mountain. He is pretty sappy, but I liked the historical aspect of the story. Once again, about Indians,Cherokee, and a white boy who is adopted..spans the 19th century, so lots going on with the Trail of Tears,etc.