Tuesday, March 23, 2010

What Books Have You Read?

As you might have noticed, I love to read. I found this list online (I think it was once passed around as a "note" on Facebook). I've tried to find the source behind it, but all I found were other people reposting it. So, I can't swear this is absolutely true, but, supposedly the BBC has this list of 100 books and feels the "average" person has only read 6 of the books on the list. Don't ask me how one is classified as "average". I'm sure I have friends who have read the majority of the books on the list and I probably have friends who haven't read any. And I wouldn't dare call any of my friends "average". :)
I'll be honest. There were books on here I had never heard of. And people who know me well enough will probably figure out which books I read on my own and which ones were assignments for Junior High and High School English classes.

I put my own personal comments out to the side on some of them.

Just so you don't have to count, I've read 28 on the list and have at least tried to read 8 others. And there are only a handful that I probably will make an attempt to read in the future. According to the BBC, I'm well above average. :) Now, if they had listed any books by Kay Hooper, Nevada Barr, Heather Graham (not the actress), Stephenie Meyer or Allison Brennan, I would have done a lot better!!

Instructions:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Star the ones you loved.*
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.
4) Underline those you have partially read or gave the OCT (Old College Try)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I didn't mind Wishbone's version of it, it was short and to the point). I do plan on reading Pride and Prejudice and Zombies though.

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien  (Couldn't get through the book series, loved the movies though!)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte  (I've been trying to read it since 1994, one day maybe I'll finish it!)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee* (one of the few instances where I love the book AND the movie!)

6 The Bible* (if you haven't noticed, I do quote this one a lot on my blog!) :)

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 (Alfred Hitchcock did a movie based on this book, I might read it to compare)

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I plan to read it, just to see what all the fuss is/was about!)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger  (I read this about a year or so ago. It's not the type of book I normally read, but I enjoyed it! The movie is pretty good, but it's a little different than the book).

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

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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 (but I do have a copy on my bookshelf. Maybe I'll get to it one day!)

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* (I don't know why they don't include this one with The Chronicles of Narnia. This is probably my favorite of the series, although I haven't read any of them in a number of years.)

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 Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I loved the miniseries made of this one back in the 1980's. A few years ago I got to meet the guy who played Gilbert!)

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 (I saw a movie version of this on TV not too long ago that had a young Dean Stockwell in it. All my Quantum Leap friends will remember his as Al). :)

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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