The Ones I've Read (Bold) and Started but Never Finished (Italicized):
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 (Yup, I'm a heathen-- I've never finished it from cover to cover, but it's kind of like my history homework-- I haven't read it but I know the content pretty dang well)
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 (I think... I can't remember for sure, but I think I've read it)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 (I have an anti-goal never to read or watch this. For no real reason other than I don't feel like it)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace -Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 - A.A. 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 (I started it once in, like, third grade. Never got past the second page, even in attempts since then)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I like this better than 1984)
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 (I got bored with this book when it turned out just to be about doing drugs and having sex and not really caring about much of anything at all)
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 Inferno - Dante
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 - E.B. 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
My Own List of Books I Have Read and Really Quite Enjoyed that Never Show Up on These Lists:
-Anything by Haruki Murakami (most especially Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicles, though you should also read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World).
-Hoffman, especially Der Sandmann, which I actually didn't read but I read Freud's description of it in his essay on Unheimliche
-Notre-Dame de Paris, which I've started four times now and never finished. One of these days, I will conquer Victor Hugo. Mark my words. Your endless paragraphs on architecture will not stop me. I get where you're going with that, Hugo.
-Ender's Game, which is one of the few Sci-fi books I've ever even touched, let alone read
-Persepolis. Let's forget that it's a graphic novel for now, and put Maus on the list, too, even though I haven't read it.
-Silence by Shusaku Endo-- it's about a Portuguese priest in Japan after they've outlawed Westerners there (except the capitalist Dutch traders)
-In Praise of Shadows
-Prisoner of Mao. Even if you know nothing about China or communism (both of which are likely if you live in the US), this book will blow your mind. Except it's out of print in English (the original language), so good luck finding it. BYU has a copy, and it's still being printed in French (the author's second native language, along with Chinese. English was his third, I believe).
-Anything by Chrétien de Troyes, because it's crazy awesome. Seriously. Let me tell you some stories about King Arthur's court, and you will probably think I made it all up. But no, Chrétien is the crazy one.
-La Cantatrice Chauve by Ionesco. Or anything by him.
-L'étranger. Or skip reading this, and just listen to "Killing an Arab" by the Cure.
-Gargantua, or anything by Rabelais. It's crazy, it's hilarious, it's actually pretty poignant through that bawdy humor. Also, giants are funny, and so are promiscuous monks who create utopias.
-Discourse on a Republic by Machiavelli. Because The Prince is a poor reflection of his real thoughts. Or, for a laugh, read Mandragola or Belfagor, the Devil who Took a Wife. Classic renaissance humor.
-Defying Hitler. It raises the question of what resistance is in situations like the Third Reich. Also, it's a compelling memoir.
-Maupassant. SO AWESOME. I once totally plagiarized Le Horla, but made it about breadboxes. It was awkward and hilarious.
1 comment:
Good list. I've read majority of them. I think you need to reconsider #21. It's the best, so good I named my child after it. Plus it's about Georgia...the best state...I'm a little partial.
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