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I don't agree that all 100 of these actually belong on anybody's must read list, but since it looks like this week we are suddenly a book blog, all books, all the time, I thought it would be fun to see what we've read and what we've not (and a big thanks to David for passing this on). Asked to name the ten books they could not live without, the British Public chose the 100 books listed below. I've bolded the ones I've read, italicized the ones I want to read, left alone the ones I don't have an opinion on and put a :P after the ones I have no interest in reading. Some of my choices will show you what a brilliantly superior reader I am and others will show you what uncultured Philistine I am, and probably all of us will disagree on which is which:
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
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman :P
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - actually, I think I might have read this- I know I read part of it, but I can't remember if it was an abridgment for school or the whole thing.
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I have read all the comedies and nearly all the tragedies. It's the histories where I'm weakest.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
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 - does it count that JennyAnyDots and Pip have read this? And that I put it on their free reading list and then forgot that I had?
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 Um, I did see the movie and I've read several reviews, critiques, and synopses. I know. It's pathetic, isn't it?
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
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 :P
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 (and I wish I had not)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel :P
52 Dune - Frank Herbert :p
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 :P
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold :p
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 :p
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - ever since I actually read Frankenstein and found out it wasn't anything at all like the movies I've been meaning to read this one.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce :P (I did have to read part of this for a high school class)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath :P
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 (but frankly, I wish I hadn't)
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 Alborn :P
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
What about you?
Friday, March 02, 2007
100 Best Books
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7 comments:
I have read precious few of these so far in my life. However, since we are homeschooling I hope to remedy that. I just read P & P for the first time quite recently and wished over and over again that I read it before watching the A & E production. I absolutely loved it, but I kept hearing the dialogue in my head spoken by the A & E cast! I am appalled that The DaVinci Code made that list. Ugh. Oh, well. I guess there's no accounting for taste. . .
But writing about all book all the time is so much FUN. This is a weird list--the books are so mixed in type. Do Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Hamlet belong on the same list?
In any case, I've read 50 of these 100 (isn't that tidy?), including 3 of the books you raspberried. (Note: I didn't say I liked them--I concur with your opinion--but I did read them.)
I've linked. The snow is coming down so hard that there's not much to do except play with the DHM's book memes...
I've only "read" 28 of them. By that, I mean that 14 of them I was supposed to read for a high school or college class that I got very little out of and quite frankly don't remember at all.
Here's my comments on the ones I've read that you haven't (all 3 of them):
I *hated* Crime and Punishment. All I remember about it was that it was bleak and scary and the main character went crazy.
Catch 22 was one if the few school books that I ended up enjoying. It was so out there and crazy that I found it a fun read. It made you think, too.
I really did like Memoirs of a Geisha, even though I was skeptical at first. It was a bit in the vein of Amy Tan books, which I am a big fan of.
I've only read six of them, though 5 are in the top 16 and 4 are in the top 8. I guess I have different reading tastes than the compilers of this list.
I did notice a dearth of Sci-Fi and from what I've heard (I haven't read it and would also give it a :P), Dune is not exactly the best of the bunch.
How did the Bible only rate #6? Lower than the Harry Potter series? What were these people thinking (or not, as the case may be:)? At least they had The Lord of the Rings ahead of Harry Potter!
I've read His Dark Materials (recently even) and it did NOT make me want to read anymore. I don't like his philosophy. And, after reading his website, and finding for sure where he stood, he's not trying to do anything tricksy and I don't like endings like that (Death of an innocent for the good of all) or something.
Memoirs of a Geisha -- this was REALLY good. Maybe not real literature, I don't know. But I was surprised how much I enjoyed it.
Dune -- The first book is okay (not great. But it kept me interested throughout it) The rest of the series goes downhill fast.
The Five People You Meet in Heaven -- read this one recently too. And frankly, it's nothing special. I don't know why people enthuse about it so much
Thrilled to see Arthur Ransome's Swallows and Amazons on the list. My kids and I are going through the series now, on book 11 of 12. We love them.
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