Books Worth Reading

A meme, a meme, I’ve been tagged for a meme by Pink Sunshine. As per usual, I won’t tag anyone but if you’re reading this and feel inspired to take part, please let me know in the comments.

I was an English major, which gives me a definite advantage.

Look at the list and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

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 (After much resisting, I mooched the first book and it’s on my to read shelf.)
5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6 The Bible (I haven’t read it all the way through but I took classes on it in college, so I figure that counts.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (I have been meaning to read this forever.)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (The first book is also on my to read shelf.)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 [Catch-22 - Joseph Heller] (One of my all-time favorites.)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Between high school, my college Shakespeare course and pleasure reading, I have read every single play and sonnet.)
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
29 Alice’s Adventures 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] (Isn’t this a repetition of #33?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (On my to read shelf.)
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 (On my to read shelf.)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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] (One of my all-time favorites.)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 High Fidelity – Nick Hornby
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons (Loved the movie.)
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 (Hated it.)
63 [The Secret History - Donna Tartt]
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (Overrated.)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (Did not care for it.)
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 Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (On my to read shelf.)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt (Didn’t care for it.)
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 [Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell] (Awesome book – nice to see it on a list like this.)
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
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
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

49% – not bad. Especially considering I hate Charles Dickens and he shows up here many times. And I don’t think I will ever live long enough to read Ulysses.