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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Books, Books, Books

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

14 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. You 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.

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  3. Holy 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.

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  4. Oh the classics. Nice list. I need to get back to some of these. Thanks for stopping by my blog!

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  5. Ruth, 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.

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  6. Kelley, 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.

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  7. Ah, 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]
    One of my favourites is The Lord of the Rings, of course [g]

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  8. I don't mean to sound mean by the way [g]

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  9. No, 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.

    I 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.

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  10. 2, 4, 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 24, 25, 29, 42, 48, 49, 52, 57, 71, 72, 83, 89, 96, 97.

    ... 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.

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  11. 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.

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  12. Well, 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!

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  13. Sara, I actually have a complete set of Shakespeare and read them often. Having had a classical English upbringing I learned to love the prose.

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  14. Zan, 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.

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