Not to be left behind by LB, C. August, Kim, Fiddler, Rational Jenn, etc., below I’ve applied the appropriate bolding and italicizing to the list of 100+ books that has been bouncing around the Internet.
To play:
1. Start with the list below in plain text.
2. Bold the ones you’ve read.
3. Italicize the ones you plan to read.
(As you might guess, bold and italicized means that I plan to re-read it. Oh, and watching a movie based on the book doesn’t count as having read it!)
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 (I read a children’s Bible, but that probably doesn’t count.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 * 1984 - 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 (I’ve read somewhere between half to two-thirds of the plays and sonnets. That’s close enough to count!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (LB did not mark this as having read it, but I know for a fact we read at least some of it together years ago. It was awful and we gave up on it.)
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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 ** Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (I love Steinbeck and have read several of his books, yet somehow managed to not read this one.)
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 (I read five of the seven, starting with great enthusiasm, but wearying of the Christian moralizing by the end of Dawn Treader.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (This was already counted in 33.)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (The book I read is called Corelli’s Mandolin. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is the movie!)
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 (I tried but didn’t succeed.)
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 – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 ** Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I borrowed Rational Jenn’s method of applying an asterisk (*) to indicate supremely marvelous books that stand out even among very good books, and I’ve used a double asterisk (**) to indicate books that would fall in my top ten list.
As C. August pointed out, there are some glaring omissions in the list. The most significant to me are Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, and Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, which are my three favorite books. I don’t know how you can make a list of novels without including those. Also, apart from Shakespeare, there was no drama; I think Schiller, Shaw, and Ibsen could have appeared on the list.
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