Saturday, August 2, 2008

Read a good book lately?

The National Endowment for the arts estimates that the average adult has read only 6 of the top 100 books . . .How about you??? (Copy and paste the list, then put in bold the books you've read, and star (*) the books you loved.)

I thank my high school English teacher Patrick Armstrong for getting me into so many of these great books! and thank you Noelle for the idea!


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(once you get past the begats, it reads really well)

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 (one of my favorites!)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've only read a few)

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*(love it!)

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* (I love these books!)

34 Emma - Jane Austen*

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen*

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis*(another favorite)

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden(good movie)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown(very interesting movie)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery*(one of my favorites)

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

52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen* (very good book)

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(do children's versions count?)(Revenge of the Whale, the story behind this book is very interesting)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (never actually read it, but I love the movie)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*(one of my favorites!)

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(good movie!)

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flauber

t86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White*

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom(very interesting concept)

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(good movie)

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* (good book)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl(Matilda's a good book, too)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (the musical is fantastic!)

2 comments:

Noelle said...

It wasn't my idea. I stole the idea from someone else's blog. But it's fun to go through it. I keep thinking of all of the great books that are not on the list, that should be. Jeff reminded me that "The Princess Bride" is absentee. Also a great book.

Noelle said...

Check out Holly's new blog at hollyfielding.blogspot.com