Sunday, October 19, 2008

How Many Have You Read?

Saw this on another blog. I'm not sure where this list of the top 100 books of all time came from, so I can't tell you what the criteria was. But I figured it was fun anyway! So feel free to post to YOUR blog and run with it.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -- Loved it, loved the movies.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling -- No interest, despite all the hoopla.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - Well, I've read large sections, but not all.
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell -- Still gives me the creeps.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -- Dickens is a great writer of the human condition.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy -- A sad book.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Have read maybe half a dozen of his plays but not all.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -- Tried to talk a high school class into reading this for our chosen novel of the year, but no dice. I read it anyway.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -- Interesting spin on time travel.
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell And also loved Scarlett.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Started. Not finished. Yet.
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- Hated it in high school. May try it again someday, but most Russian authors seem incredibly gloomy.
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 Hey, what can I say? I loved it.
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 -- One of my all time favorite books.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -- Interesting book, well done.
53 Cold Comfort Farm
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley -- So sad. Hope it doesn't come to pass.
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 -- Great book! And a lovely movie version with Richard Chamberlain.
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 -- Terrific story, definitely creepy.
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 -- Read it to the kids one year during December.
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 -- Always fun. Loved the PBS version with Jeremy Brett.
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 -- Loves this too, as well as the movies with Michael York, Charleton Heston, Richard Chamberlain and Faye Dunaway.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So let's see...I've read 38 of them. I think. Naturally, I think there are many fine classics missing, and some on this list I'm not sure should be here. But hey, I didn't make up the list. I can always make up one of my own. ;-) What's your score?