"Big Read"'s 100-Book List

[packbat]

From here, with minor edits:

If you choose, look through the following list of books and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) * Put a star next to the ones you've only partially read.
5) Strikethrough the ones you refuse to read.
6) Reprint this list in your own LJ.

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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 (if only I'd known in advance! Alas, I had not learned to quit a book then...)

14 * Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Edit: added to list at feech's suggestion.)

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 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (have read radio scripts, not books.)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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 (Dad read it out loud when we were kids)

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

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-time - 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 (Do I love it? Not sure...)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Haven't read in a while, though...)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

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

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

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 (excellent, excellent book! - although, I suspect, "Shardik" is better)

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

Statistics:
Read - 11
Planned - 10 (Edit: +1)
Loved - 6
* Begun - 10
Abhorred - 3

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That was ... a surprisingly sloppily-executed list - I count at least two partial-duplicates. But I did score over the estimate joee_girl says "the Big Read" makes, which is six read!

Comments

[explodingbat.livejournal.com]

Why did you abhor Catch-22? I remember quite liking that one.

I work in a secondhand book shop, we have something of a stockpile of Dan Brown books hidden in the shelves in the rear of the sheet music display:

Most of them don't look very well-thumbed.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Several reasons - I suppose it boils down to "I didn't find it in the slightest bit funny." I imagine I would forgive everything I hated about it if I was laughing the whole time - I certainly approve of Three Men in a Boat chiefly because I am amused by it, for example. But Catch-22 I simply found boring, incoherent, unbelievable, and cruel.

Re the photo: Hope your store didn't have to pay too much for those - they certainly aren't seeing much daylight!

[explodingbat.livejournal.com]

It was before my time but apparently the boss bought a job lot. People still come in asking for it though so we stashed them near the counter.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Ah, I see. I suppose it was popular enough when it came out that people still recommend it.

[feech.livejournal.com]

Don't bother to read _Of Mice and Men_, but rent the movie with Gary Sinise instead, by far a better, slightly less Steibecky experience.

[feech.livejournal.com]

I mean Steinbeck. Not Steibeck.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Gary Sinise - wow, I actually have a face to associate with that name! Thanks for the tip!

[feech.livejournal.com]

You don't intend to read _Catcher in the Rye_?

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Not yet - I don't know anything particularly about it, except that I'm nervous it might be literary. (I looked into Joyce once at the library booksale - I couldn't even read it.)

[feech.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't call it literary. If we're using the same meaning of the word, you're safe.

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I'll give it a shot, then!