The Big Read
25 November, 2010
I saw this on Gnoe’s blog Grassland and thought it would be interesting to compare what I’ve read. You can also check out Boof’s list at The Book Whisperer too. I’m not sure how representative the selection of titles are as I feel there are many worthy titles missing here. But then it’s impossible to pick only 100 titles without pissing someone off. And they’ve got The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe as two separate entries as well as The Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet. Really.
I’ve read 65 titles, watched 47 and started 4 that I haven’t finished. What surprised me was realising that I’ve actually only read Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and the others I’ve only seen in tv and film adaptations when I though I had read more!
What about you?
Instructions
* Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
* Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.
* Underline the ones you’ve seen the movies of.
* Tag other book nerds.
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 (all)
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 (yes, all of them!)
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
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 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
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
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 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
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
25 November, 2010 at 9:25 pm
I have seen the list on several blogs and its interesting because going through it there are books here that I have missed and I am also very glad that I have read quite a few of them. That is mainly due to my old literature teacher who has obviously done a good job on us!! I would like to go back to some the classics though and do a re-read now that I am so much older. Get a new perspective on them.
26 November, 2010 at 3:55 am
Right, I’m going to pinch this! I think I did one a few years ago but no harm in doing it again.
Jane Austen’s stories are so conspicuous that everybody knows her stories even if they have read them. They do make great productions of it though. Nothing like snuggling up to watch a BBC production with chocolates or wine if one wants a cozy night in!
26 November, 2010 at 9:52 am
OMG: 65!!! That is A Lot.
But wait a minute, you haven’t read The Grapes of Wrath???
I read it last year — starting reluctantly but managing to choose it as my favourite read of 2009 in the end!
26 November, 2010 at 10:19 am
Mystica: I too read a lot of them while at school and at uni. I would love to do some re-reads, especially Pride & Prejudice and Wuthering Heights but I’ve discovered this year that I’m no longer much of a re-reader:( Too many books!
Mae: Pinch it! I think Austen and Dickens’ stories have permeated the public consciousness through adaptations (which are brilliant) so we feel we know them. But I really should check out the ones I haven’t read…
gnoe: I think I was more conservative in my taste compared to now where I read a lot more genre fiction. Plus most of them I read while I was at school/uni and we did have a lot of very long holidays:) Ah, how I miss those carefree days! I read Of Mice and Men at school and thought it was brilliant. However I’m scared of The Grapes of Wrath because it’s SO big and sounds difficult. However, I read a number of reviews including yours which have managed to soften my fright of Steinbeck, so it’s definitely a book I am planning to read at some point.
30 November, 2010 at 1:39 pm
I love these lists! I just posted mine. You’ve read some great ones.