100 Books –A Meme

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. (Not sure who “The Big Read” is, but thought this was interesting.)

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

Hmm. Of the top 10, I’ve read 8. That right there puts me at “above average.” I’ve read 45 of these books all the way through. I’ve read at least half of three more, and I have 10 “intend to” reads. Yeah. I’m a bookaholic…

Anybody else want to play?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (I think I have 2 copies of it…somewhere…)
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 (Or the vast majority of it, anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights- Emily Bronte (didn’t like it much, not nearly as much as Jane Eyre)
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 (many, but not all)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks (I don’t think I’ve even heard of this one)
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (I’ve tried really hard to avoid it)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot (I’ve read one Eliot, and it wasn’t this one)
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 (got about halfway through it)
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 (Pieces of it)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (most of it, anyway)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (LW&W shouldn’t also be on this list if the Chronicles are)
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 (does watching the movie count?)
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 (saw the movie and liked it)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (but I didn’t like it–still I read all of it)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (didn’t like this one either)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (I think I want to, anyway)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Didn’t much like this one either)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (liked this one, tho.)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (liked the movie)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (This and G.E are my only two Dickens novels. Liked this one a lot better.)
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon (this is the one about the boy with autism, right?)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (this is the only Steinbeck I’ve read that I didn’t utterly HATE)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (I think I want to read it, anyway)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (most of Dumas’ work, except for 20 Years After)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (may have read this one, but don’t remember)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (don’t think I got much past “Call me Ishmael.”)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (not a big vampire fan)
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 (maybe)
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 (All of them, I’m fairly sure)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (SO not reading it)
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 (got stuck at the endless description of the after-battle Waterloo scene–need the abridged version, I guess…)