The Book List

I got this from Mendelbrot which is a bit north of the border.

I received a comment on my other blog from the author of Mendelbrot. She mentioned that she too had lots of visitors but few readers who actually commented. She also mentioned she was from Canada. I read this comment before the coffee had reached my brain and thought to myself: “Great! now I have an excuse to go up to the Canadian internet.”

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The Big Read reckons that the average [American] adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books listed below. I suppose then this book list activity is supposed to make you feel superior or something. Pretty sad though that that’s the AVERAGE. Regardless, it’s a pretty good list (a bit heavy on the Austen–the movies have ruined me on her) and a good starting list for tapping into some good reads, both new and old.

I’m at 55 out of 100 read and either liked or loved.

Here’s the challenge [with edits for the bloggerly challenged who don’t know where to find “strikethrough” and “underline”on Blogger]:

• Look at the list and bold [and blue]those you have read.
• Italicize [and green] those you intend to read.
• Underline [or redden] the books you LOVE.
• Strike out [brown out &/or italicise] the books you have no intention of ever reading, or (were forced to read at school and) hated. [The no intention/school book list/ book you hated category is a bit muddied, so I made the colour brown. I was going to sort it by type but then decided I was putting enough effort in already. There also could’ve been a section for “started but didn’t finish”].
• Reprint this list in your own blog.

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, no but I’ve read and loved a lot of the plays…]
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Cur
ious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (Love isn’t the right word but it has certainly stayed with me and I have read it numerous times)
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

A few I would add to this list:
The Mists of Avalon – Marion Zimmer Bradley
John Adams – David McCullough (I know its not fiction but it reads like it. Beautiful prose)
East of Eden – John Steinbeck
Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintence – Robert Pirsig
A Dirty Job – Christopher Moore (It’s not great literature but it sure is pee in your pants funny)
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris (ibid)
The Stand – Stephen King (not great literature but I loved this book and have reread it more than any other book)

What are your favorites?