I posted this up on Facebook, but will repost it here. If there’s an amazing book here that I haven’t read, tell me, and I’ll make it one of my life’s goal to read it. Cristina told me that I MUST read the Little Prince. So that’s on my reading list.
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
The books I’ve read will be bolded.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (just the first four)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (sadly, not all of it yet)
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
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 (Read the sequel though…)
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 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 Hossein
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
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 X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm
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
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
June Hur 
37
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Hmm, 37, lets see…ah, the Kite Runner. I know, I should read this, all my friends raved about this book being so great. But instead, I watched the movie, and so….well, it’s no fun reading a book when you know all its twists and turns. I hear, though, that the book was wayyy better.
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Let’s see June…”Brave new world” is one of the few science fiction novels I find exceptionally good, disquieting but very good – maybe because there are some pages about the power of literature that I found unforgettable (chapter 13). Then I love “Heart of Darkness” and “The Grapes of Wrath”, I agree with Cristina that says “The Little Prince” is unmissable (it’s in one of my first posts on FLY HIGH!).
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Brave new world, is a book I’ll definatly read. It has a fascinating premise. My cousin has this book so maybe I’ll borrow it from her.
Grapes of wrath…I’m still struggling with this book. Can’t seem to get past the first few chapters.
And as for Heart of Darkness, I’ll add this onto my reading list.
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If you haven’t read the lovely bones, give it a try. It is by far one of the best books I’ve ever read.
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2.The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3. The Bible (sadly, not all of it yet)
4. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
5. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
6. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
7. Complete Works of Shakespeare
8. Gone With The Wind
9. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
10. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
11. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
12. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
13. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
14. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
15. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein
16. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
17. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
18. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
19. Dune – Frank Herbert
20. Cold Comfort Farm
21. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
22. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
23. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
24. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
25. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
26. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
27. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
28. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
29. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
30. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
31. Watership Down – Richard Adams
32. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
I’m not counting ones I started, got bored of, and abandoned. I figure this balances the fact that my sneaky mother got me to read most of these by getting me comic books of Shakespeare since I hated him so much >_>
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LOL I also read he complete work of Shakespeare by comic book. I don’t like him either. I only like his “Twelfth Night” piece. The other ones….*snooze* It’s hard to understand his writing. It’s too old for me
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Gosh June, you’ve read a lot! I’m particularly impressed that you’ve read the Lord of the Rings – I’ve heard it takes a while to get through! If I were to suggest something, it would be His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. They are, after all, my favourite books.
If you haven’t seen it already, I’ve linked The Lovely Bones trailer (personally, I haven’t read it but it seems everyone’s a fan):
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Lord of the Rings–it was actually pretty difficult to get through all four. I found the last two books a bit….tedious. But that’s just me.
I’ve always wanted to read something by Phillip Pullman ever since I saw his name mentioned on your FP account. I’ll have to check his work out one of these days
Oh! Lovely Bones. I’ve read…just a bit of that book. Can’t wait to watch the movie. It looks…compelling
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🙂 You already read mine on FB, but I got 40. And then I had lik 10 I started and couldn’t finsh…Lovely Bones was one of them. My friends and I started a little book club, to stay in touch after we graduated HS and LB was one of the Books of the Month…it depressed me too much. Couldn’t finish it.
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Same here, I started several (Grapes of Wrath being one of them) but couldn’t get through. I think you mentioned you read this book. Don’t know how you did….
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lol, it was a school book..so I HAD to get through it
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oh June. you have to get over the stories of Shakespeare and see the way he writes. his usage of words and imagery. BEAUTIFUL. INGENIOUS. absolutely amazing… I hated his stories, but the way he would write just mesmerized my soul. i’m not exaggerating. hehe.
i miss you.
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Highschool ruined Shakespeare for me. But. I’ll give him another try. It’s so hard, though, to understand what he’s writing about that it becomes difficult to appreciate the way he writes.
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Wow, you’ve read so many of them! I was mentally checking the ones that I’d read and its not too bad :). However, I’ve read lots of other books also considered classics that are not on this list. I wonder how they chose these? That would be interesting to find out. Anyhow…Congratulations! And thanks, these are definitely some good suggested reads 😀
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I was wondering myself why these books were chosen. Maybe they were the ones turned into movies? Dont know
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I haven’t read half of them. Wow. I feel like shit (:
But go you!
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I’m sure you’ve read many other books!
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