The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? Books I've read are marked, sometimes with additional comments.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - read, twice, before the movies
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling - read them
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - read
- The Bible - read
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - read
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - read
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - read, and have avoided most things Dickens since then
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - read
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - read
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - read
- Partial Works of Shakespeare - read
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - read
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - read
- The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - might read this
- Middlemarch - George Eliot - read, reluctantly, with much napping
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - read, and nearly burned it
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - read
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - read, and waved to Douglas Adams once
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - read, with a cheat sheet for the Russian nicknames
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - read
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - read
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis - read
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen - read
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis - read; isn't this redundant to #33?
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - might read this someday
- Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne - read
- Animal Farm - George Orwell - haven't read this; it was part of a cluster of books read by my class in jr. high - some folks read this, I read Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - read
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving - recommended to me by a friend about 20 years ago, and I still haven't gotten around to it
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery - read, and the seven books that came after it
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - read
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding - read
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel - read
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- 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 - read
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - might read this
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - read
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - read
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - read
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - read
- 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 - read
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- The Inferno - Dante
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt - might read this
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - read
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - Ian's read this one
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White - read
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - read portions
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - read
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - read
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams - read
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare - read
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - read
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I believe I've read 43 of these... I might read a few more someday, but there are probably several on this list, unarguably classics, that I'm very likely not going to get around to. Some people read fiction (which most of these are) to better understand The Human Spirit or explore some Great Questions. Me, I read fiction to be entertained. Too bad I couldn't have gotten a degree in Contemporary Science Fiction or Speculative Fantasy. Not that I'd be using that degree any more than I'm using the one I have...
I've read 5 of these, my parents read 10 of them to me when I was a kid, and I've seen the movie versions of 27.
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