Thursday, December 09, 2010

To Read or not to Read

Found this list and fun activity on another blog I read, like her I would like to think I am a reader, but am really just a person that enjoys reading. Many of the books on this list are not books I would choose for fun/light reading, however seeing that I have read only about a quarter of them, I probably should reconsider that attitude :)


Feel free to play along...copy the list...the BBC has got us all thinking again...

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt. My bold is hard to read, so I made the ones I've finished red.

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 Berniere
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 – Roald Dahl
100
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I've read 24 completely, and have started but not finished at least 3 of them (it's hard to find the italics titles) There are others that I feel I should have read, but simply do not remember them. I wondered if I could make my count higher by stating that I've read some of these books more than once, but there wasn't an option for that :)

I think I will try and challenge myself to read at least 5 more books from this list in 2011. It may not sound like many, but I feel it is a manageable and therefore attainable goal!

5 comments:

  1. Oh I don't think I have even read 24 - I have started quite a few but oh they were just too boring to get through. And most of the ones I have read were required for school. I own some of them but haven't read them - again, they were for school. They just aren't my taste for the most part (I like to read books on physics - I have read a lot of those books). Although I can say I did read The Little Prince in the French version (for French class). And of course I had to read Little Women, since my mom got my name from it (Amy Beth).

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  2. I agree with Amy that there are quite a few on the list I'm not interested in. But, I do want to read several... Anna Karenina, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Middlemarch, David Copperfield, 1984, Rebecca, Catch 22... honestly any of the Russian novels pique my interest. Which 5 are you reading this year?

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  3. Aw I love this list!! Love it!! It's certainly a great list to have in mind for next year. And I think your tally should be higher as some are like 3 books in one series (e.g. Lord of the Rings!)!!

    Take care
    x

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  4. My human's life goal is to have a book she has written on a list like this!

    I don't know if she will make it, but it does make her work extra hard when she writes.

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  5. This is a great list! I've read 50 of them (in case you're wondering, I was a literature major in college, so I read a lot of them then). I agree with Amy and Leighann ... I'm not interested in a few of them, but that leaves quite a few to check out from our library! :)

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