Tuesday, October 20, 2009

reading is good for your soul

need a good book to read?
i'm not sure if i've posted this before or not - but it's a really good resource for some classics.
i'm working my way (slowly) through this list so i can say i've read more than 6.
which ones have you read?
or better yet - which ones have you not even heard of?
any that you DON'T recommend me reading?



100 books to read – from BBC
The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (all three)
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 Orwel
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 Faulk
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 Meany - 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 Inferno - Dante
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
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

11 comments:

The Dummers said...

My recommendation is to stay away from Atonement and Dracula. I'm only saying that because you made me edit Wicked for you. Also, not all Shakespeare are created equal. Beware.

jeremy said...

I was surprised to see how many of these I have read. Thank you, mandatory high school readings. I was thinking of taking on Les Miserables starting in December. We'll see. Good list, though, I might have to start working my way through it as well.

Susan G. said...

Wow...let me know when you finish number 14!!

K said...

26! Plus there were a few I started reading and then just didn't want to finish. I recently got about 100 pages into Watership Down, that's a huge book. It's about 700 pages, and while it's intriguing, the author with describe something about 5 times just so the reader gets the point. It drags a bit. 1984 has an awful, awful part in it. Our high school teacher said, "Just skip pages blah through blah." I love The Little Prince, Jane Austen... there's a bunch.
Animal Farm is a political statement, Lord of the Flies is, too. I loved Jane Eyre, but that's also a very long book.

Haley said...

I've read 20. The problem is, lots of the books on that list are boring! Does that mean I'm uneducated if I think that? :)

Keri said...

Awesome list! I'll start working my way through it too come May 6 - week after graduation! I've read 8 of them and seen 20 of them via movie! I love the BBC versions of many of the classics - that's how I got hooked on reading some of them. Watch for them on PBS. I have a couple on DVD you can borrow as well:)

Unknown said...

Wow, that's a big list to tackle! I'm not sure if you've read the Harry Potter's yet, but I loved those. I tried Bridget Jones and couldn't get into it, not to mention, had some bad language. My husband really wants to read 59, his brother read it and loved it. I read the Hobbit and liked it, but could never get into Lord of The Rings, too long and I started to get confused with all the names and lands. I read Lord of Flies in HS and really liked it for some reason. Kind of sad and political, like your friend mentioned. Good luck! Let me know what you recommend! :)

Hillary said...

wow, I'm not much of a reader but I have read 8 books on that list! I thought I'd maybe have 1 or 2...most of them were assigned in school but I still read them ;D

Erin said...

I've read/watched 25 of them. I should start trying to read the whole list as well. Right now I'm reading Missouri Brides, it's set in pioneer times. Very good reading.

Erin said...

Oh, I was going to recommend Life of Pi and the Harry Potter series. They were great.

Russ and Em said...

I've read 32. I started the Time Travelers Wife and put it down because the language is AWFUL. That said everyone I know who has finished it LOVED LOVED LOVED it. I am still torn. Let me know if you read it.

That list is really comprehensive and has a lot of variety. I will have to use it when I need something to read.

Also I just read the book The help by Kathryn S (somebody) I would HIGHLY recommend it.