The 100 book thingy

Oh, cool.

I was casting about for something to post this evening, and I wanted to do the book thing that's been floating around, but I thought I'd already done it.

But, it turns out that the one I did was about the list of the top 100 banned books, which this is not. Ergo, this is not a rerun, so don't bother complaining to the management.

Someone somewhere says this is a list of 100...what? Great books? Greatest books? Anyway, 100 books that most of us have heard of. And someone also said that the BBC thinks most people have only read six of them. Now, I rather doubt the BBC ever said that (I was probably exposed to six of these by the age of six), but it's fun and makes you feel all edumacated and stuff, so let's go.

• Bold those you have read
• * Star the ones you loved
• Italicize those you plan on reading
• Adding my own twist - # symbol on those I've read more than once
  

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (High school)
   
4. * # Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Well, I'm on book 5, and on 2 with the girls)
   
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (High school)
   
6. The Bible
   
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (High school)
   
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 (High school)
    
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. The Complete Works of Shakespeare (Yeah, right - But, a few of them. In high school.)
    
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. * # The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (High school)
    
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 (High school)
    
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. * # The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (High school)
    
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Started it with the kids, but they were too young)
    
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 Berniere
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 (Thanks, Erin!)
    
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 (Started it, but it didn't grab me)
    
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 (I think I may have read this one in Spanish - do I get extra credit?)
    
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 (Possibly? Or maybe just some children's version?)
    
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 (High school)
    
99. * # Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Hmmm. I didn't italicize anything. I guess I'm not an ambitious reader? If I were to pick one of the above that I haven't read, it would probably be The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, because I think Lisa read it and told me something about it - and if so, that probably means she liked it, and if so, I probably would too.

I guess I'm more of an opportunistic reader at this point, what with no English libraries at hand, and no good access to the English used book stores.