Below is one of those lists you always see floating around. A list of classic books people should have read. If I understand correctly the people who put this out thought the average person had only read six.
I've read 57. Plus 4 that I started but for various reasons never finished. That puts me right around 60% Isn't that a D grade? Sigh.
How many have you read? Is there a favorite of yours on the list? Or one you really want to read?
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May 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 – J. R. R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler'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
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. The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - William Golden
40. Winnie-the-Pooh – A. A. 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 – L. M. 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 Martell
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
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 - A. S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - Charles Mitchell
83. The Colour 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 - E. B. 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 & the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I've read 64 of them. Got you beat. LOL If you've read the C.S. Lewis collection...you've read "Lion, Witch, and the Wardrobe" and If you've read the collection of Shakespeare...you've read "Hamlet." I loved the whole "Dune" series.
ReplyDeleteYou win. :) There are some duplicates which makes it a little easier. The Shakespeare collection is one of the ones I counted as a partial read. I've read his sonnets and 17 of his plays but that's not the whole collection.
ReplyDeleteHoly cow! I've only read 21 and I thought I was pretty well read. I'm going to have to rectify this. Maybe read one from this list every month.
ReplyDeleteOh the classics. Nice list. I need to get back to some of these. Thanks for stopping by my blog!
ReplyDeleteRuth, that's still pretty good, and even if you haven't read all the books on here this is only one list of many. I know you've read more than 21 books so it's all good.
ReplyDeleteKelley, classics is used a little loosely in my opinion. There's a few on here and a few left off that should have been exchanged.
ReplyDeleteAh, I'm not even going to look. I think I did this on my blog a while ago. It's such a time suck cos I start getting all defensive saying, well I've read this book by the author not that one, so what the heck? And how come Shakespeare gets his entire canon listed as one book? And so on [g]
ReplyDeleteOne of my favourites is The Lord of the Rings, of course [g]
I don't mean to sound mean by the way [g]
ReplyDeleteNo, you don't sound mean. I just posted it in fun. There are millions of books that have been written and as long as you're finding the ones that you enjoy and learn from then it's all good.
ReplyDeleteI agree on Shakespeare, That definitely should have been broken up. And the Merry Wives of Windsor is hardly worth reading. Hope nobody shoots me for saying that.
2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 29, 42, 48, 49, 52, 57, 71, 72, 83, 89, 96, 97.
ReplyDelete... 24, not bad, but then, my tastes don't run to lit-fic and/or american-litfic ... give me a list of SF/F classics and I've probably read every one.
That's the thing about lists ... ya gotta know the inside info on who put 'em together and why.
Exactly. This list is a pretty good one for me (I would have changed a few things) because I majored in Comparative literature. While I've read a good bit of SF/F I'm sure you have me beat.
ReplyDeleteWell, I'm considered well-read and I know I've read 58 or so. Some I *think* I've read, but heck if I know what they are about now some nearly 40 years later. LOL!
ReplyDeleteSara, I actually have a complete set of Shakespeare and read them often. Having had a classical English upbringing I learned to love the prose.
ReplyDeleteZan, you're up there! Yea there are some books I don't remember too well. I think I've repressed most of Ulysses. I probably should read that again.
ReplyDelete