Instructions:
# Look at the list and bold those you have read.
# Underline those you intend to read.
# Italicize the books you LOVE.
# put a frowny face next to the ones you hated
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – I started this on several occasions and just didn’t manage to finish it. It’s embarrassing, but true.
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – When you go to a Lutheran college, biblical studies is required, so yes, I’ve read this book.
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 – I have seen more than half of them performed. All of the comedies, few of the histories, all of the tragedies and those inbetween ones like Twelfth Night and the Tempest. My husband has seen all but three of Shakespeare’s plays (the man actually has a life list. I’d start one but then I’d decide that I have to sit through the histories.)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – I can’t completely explain why I find this book so compelling, but I do. Although for time travel, one ought to also check out “To Say Nothing of the Dog” by Connie Willis.
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 – I quote from this one regularly.
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – Senior year high school Honor’s English class. . . sigh.
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – I had to read this one for Biology 101 in college. Don’t ask. I have no idea why.
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 (See 33.)
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
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 – I started this a long time ago. I still own the book. We’ll see if this prompts me to go back and read it.
52. Dune – Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – Okay. I only made it through half the book, but then I had to return it to the library because I had renewed it too many times.
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 – I don’t love this book, but I did find it haunting and thought provoking.
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’ 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 (I have actually started at least three times. And failed. I even tried getting a running start by re-reading “Portrait of the Artist…” and where is that on the list?) So that was the note from Girlyshoes author, but I went through the exact same process, with the same result. . .
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 – No, but I love the Laurie King story’s about Mary Holmes, Sherlock’s young assistant/wife.
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Honor’s English, 11th grade with Mr. Knight.
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – My mother used to read this aloud to us every year around Christmas, right before she read us Miracle on 34th Street.
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 (Didn’t we already do the entire works back up there on line 14?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No, not in french. Another high school requirement.
I found it interesting that the ones that I loved were mostly childrens books. Not sure what this says about me. And there are so many books that are not on this list! Where are all the Joanne Harris books? Chocolate and Five Quarters of an Orange are my two favorite of hers. No Amy Tan, Isabelle Allende. . .
Who would you want to see on the list? Is your favorite author on there? Your favorite book? Do you have a favorite book? I’d be hard pressed to pick one.
Okay, I forgot to mention two things. One, I got this from GirlyShoes (she’s on the list of blogs over there that I read regularly) and two, I can’t figure out how to underline things in this or how to put frowny faces, so those two attributes are not in my list.
SongMom
Ah! Someone else who has read To Say Nothing of the Dog! Loved that book.
Have you read The Doomsday Book by the same author?
Hi Dianne,
I read this book at your suggestion and LOVED it! Thank you so much for the suggestion.