According to this meme that's been making its way around The InterWebs, "
The Big Read reckons the average adult has read only six of the top 100 books it's printed." I've read almost a quarter of the books listed below (yes, I really read Moby Dick all the way through, and yes, it's brilliant), and I just started On the Road (so far, also brilliant: "... The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!'").
You? Any books I should definitely move to my "intend to read" list?
1. Bold the books you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline the books you LOVE.
4. Star next to the books you're reading/have read some of.
5. Copy, paste and repeat.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee6 The Bible7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller14 Complete Works of Shakespeare15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck*
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis37 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 Milne41 Animal Farm - George Orwel42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez44 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 Huxley59 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' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker*
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens82 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 White88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle90 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 Shakespeare99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Comments (6)
One of the books you have not marked with intention is Little Women. While there are others on this list I'd recommend, I would strongly recommend Little Women.
Re: your comment - Toby Stephens starred as Rochester in this absolutely fabulous version of Jane Eyre...so I would highly recommend reading that, of course, and then watching the mini-series!
I want to read Bleak House (due to the fact that I loved the show, LOL!). I have to recommend the Alexandre Dumas titles on this list, I really enjoyed those books. Also any of the other Austen books, Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Heart of Darkness.
1984, Lord of the Flies and Ulysses are great books that are on the list that you haven't read.
Books not on the list -
Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie (I can't remember if you said you read it or not)
Go Tell It On The Mountain by James Baldwin
Valley of the Dolls by Jaqueline Susann
Misadventures in the 213 by Dennis Hensley
Full Circle by Michael Palin
enjoy!
@poopienino - I HAVE read Ten Little Indians, natch! You remember the night we met ... wink, wink.
Also, Go Tell It On The Mountain. I was not so impressed. However, that could be because I read it for a class on Religion and Literature at NYU taught during a big teacher strike by a very angry woman who used the class as her own special time to rail about religion.RYC: You will cry your guts out. They showed a clip of her funeral and I was out and out sobbing, and of course my husband chose that moment to call (he was on his way home from church). He thought something horrible had happened. It's really, really moving; they are an amazing family!