My Shop (work in progress!)

Thursday 7 August 2008

Book List


Over at JJ's blog Life is All Cobblers (please see links) she posted about the average person having only read 6 of the following books. Now I think that I have read 30 of these, which makes me sad that I have not quite read a third. But I suppose it's not bad going considering I'm only 25! I thought I'd have a go at doing this as I am very bored with nothing to do at work, and my boss isn't in to see that I'm not doing any :)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte

4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill A Mocking Bird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (only ever read parts of when forced to at school and have no intention of reading any more)

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 - I want to read some but don't want to read them all!

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I thought it was rubbish)

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (one of my all time favourite books)

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 (life’s too short!)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (again life is too short)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (not sure I have ever read this all the way through)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (not that into Dickens so just a couple of his will do)

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 (100 million times better than the film)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Oh the shame! Pacey plot, vaguely interesting but awfully written)

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 (again life is too short)

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (again life's too short)

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 - like Shakespeare I would like to read some but not all

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (have heard it’s pretty dull)

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (take that you wasp fuckers!)

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


Key:

Bold - I have read this book
Italic - I intend to read this book
Underlined - I especially like this book
Red - I have no intention of reading this book

4 comments:

Ruth said...

I tried doing this and got bored - who dreamed up the list? - I could think of lots of better ones. Has anyone read the whole of the Bible (apart from my dad)? And why are some of them repeated (Narnia for example?)

Gill said...

Do try to read crime and punishment- It is very good.

J.J said...

Ruth - apparently 'We' The Great British Public came up with the list...before admitting to on average only having read 6 of them - so Karen - you are WAY ahead girl!

As for Ruth's second question - because The Great British Public are even dumber than we tend to think we are???

Karen said...

Also complete works of Shakespeare is on, then Hamlet is further down!

I would kinda like to read Crime & Punishment but I don't get on very well with classics because of the language. I find it very hard going.

What I want to know is who is this great British public that they ask? They didn't ask me and did they ask any of you? I bet they didn't.