Book List

My friend spoke of the following list of books a couple of days ago:

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
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
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 - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
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
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
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 - 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 Burnett
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
80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
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 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

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

Apparently the majority of people have read 6 of these books. I have read 13, cover to cover. Probably about 10 more were assigned to me at some point in high school, and if I was lucky I made it through the first chapter. I was not much of a reader in school, but now that I am out of college and no longer forced to read these books, I'm going to try again. I think for me, knowing that someone was forcing me to read anything made me want to read it less, so, I'm trying again on my own terms.

The inspiration for this project came from a few different places. First, the friend who sent me this list is starting her own blog and it looked like fun, so here goes my attempt, in a "Julie and Julia" sort of fashion. Also, I've always been interested in works that are deemed "classic," and even more intrigued by the notion that hardly anyone has read or watched any of these classics. I tried to make it through AFI's 100 greatest movies of all time or one of those lists, but got distracted and never actually finished, so maybe movies will make an appearance too.

But I guess the thing that really got this going was my going to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (in 3D, no less) last weekend. Even though I woke up on Monday with blurred vision, no balance, and convoluted depth perception, (hopefully due to the 3D experience), I still was interested in the story of Alice in Wonderland. I started to see similarities between that movie and the animated Disney version, and I began to wonder what Lewis Carroll had actually written that made the images in both films so similar. So, on a shopping trip to get fabric for a new purse I am making (another project), I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, first published in England in 1865 and 1871, respectively.

In future posts, I will probably talk about my new project as a whole, as well as the books I am reading and how it's going so far. Even though I would, as a rule, start with #1, I am starting with #29 because
1. I don't want to start off this long journey with a story that I do not like i.e. Pride and Prejudice. (So sue me, I really don't get the hype...but I can talk about that later when I try to read it again)
2. I already have Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
3. I'm contemplating going really crazy and reading out of order (gasp!)

Also, there is NO way I am reading the Bible OR the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Just throwing that out there. I have read parts of both of these before, and having been an (almost) English major, I've read enough Shakespeare to know what he is all about. As for the Bible....I actually did try to read that once simply because I wanted to know ALL the stories. And, surprisingly, I did get through Leviticus before I abandoned that project. However, I feel like I know what I need to know from that one and it's not meant to be read cover to cover anyway. Plus, if I'm going to read a religious book like that, I might as well read something that I am not as familiar with. So, I'll contemplate that one later.

As for now, I'll enlighten you with my reading of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (#29).