100 Books (plus 10)

Because I'm a stick-in-the-mud and a fuddy-duddy, I rarely do these types of lists. It's one of the reasons I don't really like FaceBook. Also, you kids get off my lawn!

That said, this list of 100 books was kind of fun and gratifying to do. I first saw it at RationalJenn and 3-Ring-Binder.

Here's how you play 100 Books:

• Bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Strike out those you will never, ever read. (my little addition to this exercise)

Note: watching the movie doesn’t count.

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 (Currently reading for the first time with my 5 yr old)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Read some of both the old and new, using a historical – i.e. secular – study guide. It was moderately interesting.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - 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 (Does reading most of them over the course of a few decades count?)
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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Oh how I wish I could un-read this book. Though for cultural knowledge of my enemies, I suppose it has some value.)
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 (This, plus the other 5 books in the series... I've probably read the whole series 4 times. I also read the "prequels" by Herbert's son, but they are really not very good.)
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 (I tried to read it and got about 1/3 of the way on three different occassions, and have no intention of trying again.)
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 (I tried to read this a few times, forgetting each time why I stopped after the first 20 pages. Just pure crap.)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

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Not a bad showing, and I find it interesting that I have so few itallicized titles. From that list, I've read most everything I want to. And there are a lot I will never pick up.

Now, what of the glaring omissions and the overall weirdness of the list? I read in the comments on RationalJenn's post that this list is likely from The Guardian (UK) and that rings a bell. I detect a strong British slant in the list--way too much Dickens and Austen (though I can forgive the Austen). There are very few prominent American novels, and their absence is glaring in light of the fact that things like "The Five People You Meet in Heaven" is there. I know this isn't a "100 Best Books of All Time" list, but seriously? Mitch Albom?

Where are (for good or for bad):

1) Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
2) The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
3) For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
4) Sophie's Choice - William Styron
5) The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
6) Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
7) The Foundation Series - Isaac Asimov
8) Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
9) The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
10) The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

I'm sure I'm missing some other good/bad/important ones, but at the very least the addition of these ten would pad my numbers make a better list.