I have already posted about my love of books. So this shouldn't come as a shock to any of you. But I have been looking for a list of books to read (you know, the lists of famous "Classic" books that everyone should read in his/her life. (ps. why are all the "Classics" written by white European authors, mainly boys?) My uncle posted this one his facebook, and I liked it because it has some other books on it as well. I needed a place to keep the list when I need it to look for more books so I thought I would copy him and make a post of it. The Xs are the book I have already read. The Os are the ones that I want to read the most! (If you have any other suggestions of good books, please comment and let me know. I just finished my most recent book series (The Alvin Maker series by Orson Scott Card), and am looking for more books!
The BBC produced this list and said that the average person has read six of these books. (Thanks to High School English requirements I am sure.) I have read 17.5, yay for me!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x (This is a little X because I read most of the series, but I got stuck and just couldn't finish. Blah. I loved the Hobbit though!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte O
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 5.5
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X (SO sad, but such a good book.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X (LOVED this book)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger O
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 3
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 X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Total: 1
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma-Jane Austen X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen O (Just watched Lake House and HAVE to read this!)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X (I don't know how this is different from the Chronicles of Narnia.)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
Total: 3
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 (Tried to read this and hated it.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total: 0
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Se
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafo
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
Total: 1
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
Total: 0
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
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
Total: 1
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker O
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 X
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
Total: 1
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 X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X
Total: 2
3 comments:
"Animal Farm" is an interesting read. It certainly lets you in on the inner-workings of the Russian revolution - even though it uses animals to tell the tail - I recommend you read this one. I love "A Tree Grows in Brooklyn" - I read it for the first time as a sophomore in high school and I loved it!
I also enjoyed "Mother Tongue," it was beautiful in all its imagery! I really wish I put aside more time to read - I would do it a lot more.
Oh, and just to let you know - I'm Erin. I went to junior high and high school with Dave. You're a doll miss Shantel - congrats to you guys!
Haha-- I got most of the way through Lord of the Rings and then had to stop as well. Also I started Lord of the Flies and put the book down in disgust. LOVE reading!
So, here's my 2 cents. You've got Wuthering Heights listed as a want to read. How that got to be a classic I'm not sure because I didn't care for it at all. Heathcliff really is an awful person! It's not worth the time to read unless you're really bored. I think you should switch it for Anne of Green Gables. You'll absolutely love it! Also, not on this list (I think I may have told you this before) is The Hiding Place which is fantanstic and I would consider it one of the best books I've ever read. That's a long 2 cents, but there it is!
Post a Comment