Thursday, September 25, 2008

100 Books

My friend Heidi did this on her blog, so I decided to as well.

*** Here is a list put forth by the National Endowment for the Arts in the US. It lists the top 100 books, and asks how many you’ve actually read.The Big Read [which is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

Edit**See below for more information regarding this list

I have colored the ones I have read. .. .
  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 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
  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 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 - William Shakespeare
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Thanks for reading!P.S. The list is random, not in order of importance -

So I have read 33 of them, if I counted right. Not bad, I guess.

Some of the books seem to repeat a bit, like 14 says the complete works of Shakespere (who has read the complete works?), and 98 is Hamlet. Also with the Chronicles of Narnia. But still interesting.

Tell me how many you have read, and also give me a recommendation of some to read that I have not yet read. I am not interested in all these books, but I'm always looking for another good read!

Tag. .. if you wish. . . Do this on your blog and let us all see what you have read.

***EDIT: I found a little more info regarding this list of books: The list I posted is the result of a poll/survey conducted online last year by World Book Day. "The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without." - wrote The Guardian in an article published on March 1st. And then they take us to the list - in HERE . So this list is just for fun, as far as I'm concerned.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have only read 16 of these. Yikes!

Too many are chick books!
No John Grisham or Michael Crichton? No Golf books?!

The one book that I've read that I'm suprised didn't make it was The Good Earth by Pearl Buck.

I guess I'll have to try a few of these.

Julia Kelly said...

Well, i better get reading something besides Twilight...that didn't make the list?? :)

I've read 11...not too great.

Shareen said...

I've read more than half. I guess that temporary pursuit of an English major did me some good - I can feel smug at times. However, how a lot of these books made anyone's list of top 10 titles they couldn't live without is beyond me.

Anonymous said...

Interesting list - helpful and I will focus on reading more books from this list. However - there is nothing on the list that is historical or biographical. Where is David McCoullough, William Manchester, Joseph Ellis and the Sharaars? Surely their works are as important as JK Rowling! Also - how about something from the world of sports? Try reading The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. I have read about 25% of the books.

Linda Toolson said...

I have read 34 of the books, if my memory services me correctly. I am always happy to see a list of good books to read so will check out some of them.
I agree that it doesn't have some books that I have really liked. No S. Meyer, no Shannon Hale, etc., plus I also liked some of the historical books that Brian mentioned. But fun to look at.

Shannon said...

Hmmmm...an english major, and I've only read 33...I guess I should be ashamed of myself. Interesting list. Besides missing the authors mentioned on other comments, I would like to see Francis Hodgson Burnett and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Interesting post.

kelly said...

that's a pretty good percentage kristie.
to be honest i couldn't even get thru reading the list.
hee hee.