Monday, February 13, 2012

100 Books to Read.

According to the BBC, the average person has only read 6 of these 100 must-read books. I've bolded the ones I've read, and italicized the ones that I've partially read or never finished.

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
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
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 Carol
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 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 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 Mitchel
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 The 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

So, that makes it a total of 26 books read, and 9 partially read. Not too bad, eh? One of my goals in life is to  have read all the books on this list. I'm basically about 1/4 through it, so hopefully within a few years I'll have finished it!

Oh, by the way, I passed my 100th post without realizing it. Haha, no point in celebrating now. Celebrations will come for 200th then!

How many of the books have you read?

11 comments:

  1. I've only read 24, and started but not finished 3 :) A lot of them are on my list though, so hopefully soon I'll be able to check off even more!

    ~Stephanie

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  2. I've read about 10 of those and finished all that I've read. I might have to print this list out and take it to the library. I love a good read.

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  3. 15 for me and 2 partials. I have several of those sitting on my shelf in my 'to read' pile. And considering you said you often fall asleep while reading you did really well. You've picked some really good ones.

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    1. I just thought of something. Are you counting, for example, the Harry Potter books as one as they are listed, or as seven?

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    2. Nope, I counted all the Harry Potter books as one book. So all the Harry Potter books were counted as only 1 of the 26 I read.

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  4. I've only read a few! Though I wonder why Hamlet is #98 when earlier in the list was The Complete Works of Shakespeare lol? Surely Hamlet would be in that!

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    1. I know haha it's weird. A couple of those were like that, like the Chronicles of Narnia series and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Hm...

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  5. I'm on 19 at the moment but I'm reading myself a bit of Anna at the moment and kind of loving it.
    I'm also extremely embarrassed that most British people have on average read 6. Don't judge my country, we sit and watch tv all the time x

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  6. Looks like I've read 39. I'm really happy about that! lol Oh, you have to read Anne of Green Gables!! It was one of my favorites! And Bridget Jones's Diary is hilarious (like, laugh out loud funny). This was a fantastic post, by the way. :)

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    1. 39?! Seriously? *applauds*

      Anne of Green Gables? I'll add that to my list for my next library visit. Oh, and Bridget Jones's Diary. I've seen the movie, but haven't read the book (I know, what an atrocity to have seen the movie before reading the book lol). And thanks!

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    2. The Bridget Jones books will have you laughing out loud. They are just hilarious.

      I think you will love them, as well as Anne of Green Gables. Have you seen the miniseries? It's also outstanding.

      And, I was stunned I read 39 books! lol It was a pleasant surprise. lol

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