Reading List

I'm busy making and narrowing down lists of books I'd like to read on vacation in less than two weeks (!). Then I saw this note on Facebook (called "The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?"), and I normally wouldn’t post something that I saw on the FB, but this caught my attention for a few reasons:

• The person who posted this list had read 46 of the books!
• I just had a conversation with a friend who said he wanted to read more classics. He had just finished The Count of Monte Cristo and LOVED it, so it moved to the top of my list (as soon as I’m in the mood to read a 1500 pager, that is) and it is on this list as well.
• In this same conversation about reading classics, I admitted to this friend that I’ve tried and tried to read Austen and I’ve never been able to get interested enough to finish a book of her’s (::gasp::). Four of her novels are on this list. :/
• The best book I’ve read in 2009 is The Life of Pi (based on LH’s recommendation) and it is on this list.
• The main character of the series I am currently reading makes a few references to Wuthering Heights, so it sparked my interest in reading that book, and it is on this list.
• I think I’m correctly remembering that the title of my sister’s blog comes from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night. It’s always been on my list of books to read, and it is on this list, too.
• I JUST asked my sister to try and get The Time Traveler's Wife for our vacation. I've been on my library's waiting list for three weeks and it doesn't look like I'll get it in time. And it's on this list.

So, anyway, I think this list is rather random, and by no means comprehensive, but since it seemed like I had a lot of recent encounters with books on this list, I posted it here. That way I can refer to it as time goes on.

I've only read 23 of them, FYI.

Here's the list with my Yes or No behind each book.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - No
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - No
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - No
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – No
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes
6 The Bible – Most of it, obviously, but sadly, I think I have never read every word of it.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - No
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman – No
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Yes
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - No
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - No
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - No
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - No
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – No
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - No
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - No
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - No
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Yes
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Yes
26 Wicked - Gregory Maguire - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - No
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - No
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - No
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Yes
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein - Yes
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – No
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – Yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving – No
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - No
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - No
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel – Yes
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - No
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - No
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - No
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - No
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - No
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76 The Inferno - Dante – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byatt - No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - No
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - No
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - No
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - No
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – No
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - No
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Yes