Tuesday, August 18, 2009

100 Books

Tagged by Steve over at Western Fiction Review with another one of those memes. This time, it's a list of 100 books, and I'm supposed to tell which ones I've read. I've put those titles in bold. There's no book #26. What the heck. Every list has a book 26, but not this one.

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 (first two only)
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 (there are bound to be a couple I missed)
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
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
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 Graham
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 (but not the Chronicles)
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 (had to read this at school)
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 (another school read)
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - 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 Inferno – Dante (most, but not all)
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 (all and more than once)
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

14 comments:

Cap'n Bob said...

Depending on how you count them, I'm at about 20. Twenty-five if you count Classics Comics.

WV: cajeer. A preposterous career

Todd Mason said...

An odd list. I'm proud not to have read some of them, though that's just wrong (till I've actually suffered, I've no right to actually slam Dan Brown--film bits don't count). (Anyway, I like watching Tatou.)

Though it is sobering how many of these works I've started and not finished, even when I was enjoying myself at one level or another. Including the COMPLETE SHAKESPEARE can be said to be cheating, but it is WS.

Donna said...

That's going around Facebook too.

#26 should be Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.

Anonymous said...

I've read 44, including about half a dozen or so you haven't read, Bill.

Question: why is Hamlet listed separately from the Complete Works?

I recommend the Bill Bryson (#74? 75?); I've read and enjoyed most of his books.

I agree it's an odd list.


Jeff

George said...

THE FARAWAY TREE COLLECTION by Enid Blyton? Never heard of it.

mybillcrider said...

Blyton's very popular in England.

Rusty said...

Of the ones you haven't read yet, I can certainly recommend #37, The Kite Runner, #59, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night, and #74, Notes from a Small Island. (My favorite Bryson is probably The Lost Continent, and I'm A Stranger Here Myself, In a Sunburned Country, and The Mother Tongue are all great fun. He and I were born the same year, so I got a big kick out of The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid.

I didn't think they let you have a graduate degree in English until you'd plowed through Ulysses.

I am somewhat abashed at the number of classics I've been meaning to read and haven't gotten to yet.

Word verification: materi -- where's Al? Where'd Al go? We need him at the end of the line there.

Rusty

pattinase (abbott) said...

I think you would like THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-given your openness to read YA novels and
And Bryson is good. He has the best little book on Shakespeare, too.

mybillcrider said...

I have the Dog in the Nighttime book, Patti. Just haven't gotten to it yet. Also have read several by Bryson, just not the one on the list.

Anonymous said...

I read Dog in the Night Time too. It was better than I'd expected considering it was one of those books read by non-readers, if you know what I mean (like The Lovely Bones).

Jeff

Rick Robinson said...

I have read 63 of the 99 on the list, if you add Brideshead, it's still 63 though I did watch the Masterpiece Theater presentation a couple of times... which of course does not count.

It's an interesting, slightly unusual list. I wonder who concocted it? I wonder why a lot of things are ON it and a lot of others ARE NOT? Where are Huckleberry Finn, Grapes of Wrath, Main Street, Shogun? Why no Cooper, Hemmingway, Faulkner, Sinclair Lewis, Hammett, Chandler?

Anyway, thanks for the exercise.

Dan said...

I got 33.

Anyone whowould make another person read MOBY DICK should be harpooned and fed to the whales.

mybillcrider said...

I've read that one several times, Dan. And, yes, I used to inflict it on my students. I don't think any of them actually read it, though.

Rick Robinson said...

I had to read it (MOBY DICK) in senior high school English class. So read it I did. I didn't like it much, but I read it, every excruciating word of it. I now remember just about nothing of it, except I was surprised anyone survived.