Book List

I got this from here, but I don’t know where it originated. It reminded me of something, though – if you are a writer, reading is an important, and often overlooked, part of the job. Reading a great book can inspire you to write one as well. Reading a bad book can be a helpful reminder watch for common mistakes you may not have noticed in your own writing.

Anyway, check out the list – I did the “score” thing at the end, but it’s more or less irrelevant. One thing I do wish is that I could have some sort of indicator to books I read that I hated rather than just the ones I loved. Oh well. Also, wtf at including both “the complete works of Shakespeare” AND “Hamlet”?

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:

1) Copy and paste into a note of your own. Delete my answers.
2) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
3) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
4) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x+
6 The Bible x+
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy x
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller x+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare x
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x+
9 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell x
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald x
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy x
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky x
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck x
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x+
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy x
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x+
34 Emma – Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x+
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 x+
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell x
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x+
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel *
52 Dune – Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons x
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen x
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley x+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon x
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez x+
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov x
63 The Secret History – Donna Tart
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac x+
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy x
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett x
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plathm x
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt x
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens x
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker x
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 x
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint Exupery x
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x+
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I think that puts me at 60. Though, I sincerely wish I had never read any of the ones by Jane Austen. I know there are people out there who love her, but… ughh…

Related posts:

1. The trouble with writing out of your element
2. Wasted Post

Tags: BBC, books, literature, Reading, Writing