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:
Depending on how you count them, I'm at about 20. Twenty-five if you count Classics Comics.
WV: cajeer. A preposterous career
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.
That's going around Facebook too.
#26 should be Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh.
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
THE FARAWAY TREE COLLECTION by Enid Blyton? Never heard of it.
Blyton's very popular in England.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
I got 33.
Anyone whowould make another person read MOBY DICK should be harpooned and fed to the whales.
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.
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.
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