I was going through tidying up some old posts and found this draft from August last year and thought I would share it. I know the list got posted around the net a bit so you may have seen it before.
Any lists of things you should read/do always get my hackles up. I think everyone should read art history books, but they don't. Fools. Also why 'should' we have read them? To be able to pass ourselves off as clever? To be able to laugh at the right literary jokes? Anyhow to top it off the BBC reckons most people will have only read about six of these. Patronising much? Possibly as someone who wasn't allowed to watch much television and grew up in a house filled with books and loves reading I am not a very good 'average person'. To prove them super dooper wrong I have bolded what I have read and italicised a few I never intend to read unless locked in a room with nothing but that book for a few days. But then it also looks like I don't much care for Russian books because I haven't read any Dostoyevsky, but I did recently enjoy reading Turgenev and also went through a stage at uni when I only read Bulgakov. I also have to confess that going through it a lot of the books I haven't read are ones I would really like to read when I get the chance. Anyway, feel free to take the list and compare what you have read, or scoff at it or scoff at me if you like!
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
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 - (half bolded as i have probably read about half).
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 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 Bernieres - (attempted and DEEPLY disliked so never finished)
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 - (FFS why the hell should I read this?)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
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
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
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6 comments:
one of the better lists that I've seen (but the need to remove the davinci code...)
I have read probably five of those. Maybe I need to get out more! :P
I do love to read and I read a lot, but I never go for the 'classics'. I would like to read Watership Down though.
Or even 'not get out' more! I think that's my problem, too much sitting at home with a book. Not that it's a problem I guess. I probably only read 'classics' about 25% of the time. In recent times I more likely to be found with a sci fi or fantasy novel.
I'm really into modern Japanese fiction especially, and I love those post-punk sort of writers like Michelle Tea. Love a good fantasy/sci-fi too, but I haven't read one in ages!
I haven't heard of her, I will look out for her books.
Some of your never-to-read italics ones are really good. Rebecca is a BRILLIANT book, and I really enjoyed both The Lovely Bones and Captain Corelli. Different strokes I guess.
Liked the list, anyway. I, for one, was gratified to see a list that's not fully populated with quote-unquote capital-C classics.
Go pleb!
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