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