A book list.

The Big Read reckons that the average [American] adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books listed below. I suppose then this book list activity is supposed to make you feel superior or something. Pretty sad though that that's the AVERAGE. Regardless, it's a pretty good list (a bit heavy on the Austen--the movies have ruined me on her) and a good starting list for tapping into some good reads, both new and old.

I'm at 34 out of 100 read and either liked or loved.

Here's the challenge [with edits for the bloggerly challenged who don't know where to find "strikethrough" and "underline"on Blogger]:

• Look at the list and bold [and blue]those you have read.


• Italicize [and green] those you intend to read.


• Underline [or redden] the books you LOVE.


• Strike out [brown out &/or italicise] the books you have no intention of ever reading, or (were forced to read at school and) hated. [The no intention/school book list/ book you hated category is a bit muddied, so I made the colour brown. I was going to sort it by type but then decided I was putting enough effort in already. There also could've been a section for "started but didn't finish"].


• Reprint this list in your own blog.

[With thanks to "This Space For Rent"]

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
The Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare [well, no but I've read and loved alot of the plays...]
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis [Hard with a series. I loved some, others not so much]
Emma – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres [I have trouble reading books EVERYONE is reading... 10 years should be a good gap...]
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne [?? or was it House at Pooh Corner??]
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons [LOVE LOVE this book]
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson [didn't like it much]
Ulysses – James Joyce [This is Leah's put-to-sleep book. Bloomsday is fun though]
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry [Love this book, esp. the ending...]
Charlotte’s Web – EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo