100 Books

[kasuchans]

Apparently, BBC says that most people have only read 6 of the following 100 books. Bold the ones you've 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 (Bits here and there, for catechism and such.)
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 (Oh look, I'm done now! XD)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (A few, but not all. Must remedy this.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’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 (All of them, actually!)
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 (OMG SO GOOD)
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 (This book is GREAT)
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
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 

21. I feel proud. I think A Clockwork Orange should be on that list, though. Seriously.

Comments

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

48, I'm extreamly proud with myself, but they're missing some calssics that should be on the list. A Clockwork Orange, Notes From Underground, Protrait of Dorian Gray, Gulliver's Travels, Frankenstein, and The Sword in The Stone.

[slashxmistress.livejournal.com]

This is a weird arbitrary list - not only are they missing classic's but there's some weird choices as well- Bridget Jone's Diary- really? and the DaVinci Code- those are popular sure but...

Also aren't #14 and #98 redundant? lol

But that said - I've read 67 :D

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

With that being said, Harry Potter? Really? I know they were pretty good, but do they really deserve to be on this list?

Yes, yes they are.

Well done! *needs to stretch my library card a little more* I've read so many books that the never even considered... Like what about The Outsiders? The Hatchet? Any book on philosophy. I really need to stop buying all my books and just use my library card more, I'm running out of shelf space anyways.

[slashxmistress.livejournal.com]

LOL exactly! I guess some of these were like - the first of their kind? Or the first real stand out of their genre -idk . I do wonder what the criteria were for the list or if they just picked some at random!

You should check out paperback swap! I've only been on a little while but I'm totally addicted! My profile is HERE :)

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

I'd like to make my own list of "must reads" (My little brother got a summer reading list sent homw with him last year, all of the books were either mindmelting crap, or books no one has ever heard of.)

I love the idea, but I have two problems 1) I'm in Canada, and this is for US students 2) I have serious issues giving up books, my shelf has books that I HATE but I can't get rid of them. Hell, I'm an atheist, but I have a copy of the bible because it's a book and I can't let it go. :(

[slashxmistress.livejournal.com]

Ah I forgot about the Canda thing *fail*
There's also Bookmooch.com - same principal but international.

I know what you mean about giving up books though! I am absolutely a book hoarder! and there are some 'keepers' that I'll never give up But I read so much and collect so many that there's no place to put them all! I got over keeping books I don't love a long time ago - they take away shelf space for books I do love!

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

That's alright *pats*

I can't willingly give them up without help, my goal is to have my own library, complete with rolling ladder. I know they take up space, but I figure as a writer you can learn more from bad books that you can from good books.

[slashxmistress.livejournal.com]

LOL! Oh I'd love my own library with rolling ladder!!!
But I'd fill it with good books! (or well books I like anyway- "good" is kinda subjective isn't it?)

Life is too short to waste on horrible books! And sure you can learn from bad books - if you can analyze 'why' they're bad. But you can learn more from reading good books- it's a lot easier to copy something than to 'not' copy something!

You could have your own museum of horrible prose though! LOL

Of course I make altered books too - so I sometimes keep the horrible ones just to desecrate them O.O

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

That it is.

The problem with copying good books is deciding what makes them good. Sometimes you can't decide what about the book is good, you just know it is. It's super easy to know why a book is bad. *cough*twillight*cough*

Omg! I did that to a war book, it had a lot of pictures so me and my bff had at it. (We did the same thing to my grad yearbook.)

[kasuchans-v2.livejournal.com]

Twilight... God, what happened there? Seriously.

Nice! I've never decorated a book, actually; I like to keep them pristine. XD

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

What happened? Stephanie Meyer barfed up scrabble tiles and called it a book.

Really bad books are fun to "decorate". Like, you can take a page and black out most of the words to leave a poem, or... I don't know, what ever you want to do!

[kasuchans-v2.livejournal.com]

Actually, IMHO, the Twilight books were just mediocre stuff. I rather liked the series, actually, as a stupid and mindless thing to read, before the fourth book. After that, which read like a bad fanfiction, SERIOUSLY, and the movies... They went massively downhill from there.
*is shot*

Oh, I get it. I just have this THING about writing on books :/ I can't do it. It's weird.

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

Omg! You acctually managed to read them?! She writes for todlers! *is used to classic literature* Her style of writing is a dumbed down, Miley Cyrus version of Anne Rice. In fact, Anne would/is probalby ashamed to write the same genre. Sorry if you liked them, but they were terrible. I could put up with the movies simply because the script writter adapted a shitty book into a less than ok movie.

I get that too, I can only do it to certain books (my favorite being old medical textbooks).

[kasuchans-v2.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah. I find classics a bit hard to get used to; I'm used to modern, edgier young-adult and adult fiction. LOL at the Miley comparison!

I found the movies even worse, actually. I watch them for Taylor Lautner. But seriously, a large amount of why I hate them so much is the fanbase and their stupid, stupid OBSESSIVENESS. *seethes*

[aholelabledlove.livejournal.com]

I'm the kind of person that loves classic lit, not to say I don't like modern books too :P

I worked at a movie theatre when the first twilight came out. Before every movie we had to go in and tell people not to record the film, yadda yadda... I'd always scream TEAM HARRY POTTER before I left...