Oh, go on then...

[panik]

Blagged from so many; most recently elmyraemilie , cross_stitchery and davidbrider 

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here (I find that hard to believe but there you go). Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. I'm adding; underline those that are defo on your 'to read' list'. Here we go...
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - I've read bits of it; of course I have. Almost everyone in Western Civilisation's read some of it, surely?
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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger – One of the worst books I’ve ever read. Just terrible!
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 Bernieres – Yes! I finally got around to reading it!– about ¼ way through at the moment.
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. Dunno where the typo crept in but that’s Meany, btw.
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 – I don’t get the Atwood love, I find her writing turgid and tedious.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel – the overtly religious message annoyed me after a while. I’ll probably go back to it and try again sometime.
52 Dune - Frank Herbert – it’s that fantasy ‘thang’; Lord Atrium of Ampersand set out across the sandy wastes of Aardvark and etc. etc. It does nothing for me I’m afraid. It’s been done once, brilliantly - I really don’t need to read LOTR again, and again, and again...::sigh:: I know it’s a modern classic. I do intend to give it another go. Eventually. Maybe.
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 - One of my top three  favourite books ever.
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - another in my top 3.
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 – Too bloody bleak!
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell – Currently awaiting delivery of my copy from Amazon!
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
 

And now I genuinely have to turn off the emails and get down to some work. After coffee. And Just a MInute...

And ETA (because I'm drinking coffee, listening to Just a Minute *G*) why is The Five People You Meet In Heaven in there (a rather so-so book imo) and not the infinitely beautiful and superior History of Love by Nicole Kraus? Two books  linked in no way whatsoever except that I read them at the same time but the one is so much better than the other!

This is a puzzling list. I see no reason for many of their choices at all.

 

Comments

[miwahni.livejournal.com]

Oh thank the lord and all that's holy, someone else who didn't like Dune and hasn't read The Da Vinci Code. I was starting to feel quite alienated from the human race for a while there. Mind you, I couldn't get into On The Road and found it to be terribly self-indulgent and boring. Except for the bit when they're motoring into New York City with their heads wrapped in scarves, and he's ruminating on how they could be Arabs coming in to perform evil acts or somesuch. I read this not all that long after 9/11 and I remember that it stopped me cold.
Apart from that - there are 40 books on the list that I have read, and quite a number that I still intend to try, such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez's contributions.

[gillyp.livejournal.com]

I found Dune tedious beyond belief, but I'm willing to give it another go. It's on my list to try again in a few week's time. The DVC has never appealed t me in the slightest, nothing I've heard about it tempts me and having just finished one dire dropping of a novel (The Reincarnationist by MJ Rose) that proclaimed on the reviews; 'if you loved the Da Vinci Code, you'll adore this...' I can only assue I did the right thing in ignoring TDVC.

But - How could you not like On the Road? O:! ::is mildly shocked::

*g* - nah, I understand why some people wouldn't like it but I admit, I think it's a masterpiece. I read it at least 2ce a year as a rule. :o)