The reading meme

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. I think I can do a little better than that.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I tried, but they're SO DULL
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - One of my favorites
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - Not the whole thing, but I spent my time in Sunday School and Catechism
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Gawd, what a dullard
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I only read The Golden Compass
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - I'm not a Dickens fan, though.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - Some! Nobody has read all of it. And plays meant to be read anyway! And sonnets are redundant.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier I always wanted to read this.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Believe it or not, I missed this when I changed schools.
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger I have this at home.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot I don't even know why I want to read this.
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 - Steinbeck puts me to sleep!
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 I don't typically read Austen, but I really liked this one. One of her smarter female characters.
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell - I hated this more than 1984.
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown The most brainless book to ever earn eleventy billion dollars.
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - It's the only Atwood book I really got into. Excellent on so many levels.
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan Only about 5 chapters. McEwan stimies you in the details.
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Why did they make us read so much bloody Dickens in high school?
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - And so much friggin' Steinbeck!
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I read this in my high school senior French class. What a hoot to read a book in a foreign language and actually understand it!
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Another high school torture.
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Gah!
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker - Read this in college. I can't remember the name of the class, but we read Dracula, Frankenstein, A Christmas Carol, and the Batman graphic novel. The prof was a bit off, but fun.
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - I loved this around the age of 11 or so.
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens The only Dickens I can stomach.
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White I remember crying so hard at the end of this when I was a kid. And I hate spiders!
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery Le Petit Prince en francais! I didn't like it, though.
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams This was as torturous as Animal Farm. I had to read both in 8th grade, and hated them!
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - I loved this SO MUCH as a kid. I read it over and over and over. And the sequel, too. Charlie and the Glass Elevator or something? Such a wonderful story about good things happening to a good kid and all the brats getting what they deserved. I read it every time I felt picked on.
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo Snoozerville


No idea what happened to 99 & 100!