Another “game” from Facebook:

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.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – read, twice, before the movies
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling – read them
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – read
6. The Bible – read
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – read
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – read
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – read, and have avoided most things Dickens since then
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – read
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – read
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – read
14. Partial Works of Shakespeare – read
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – read
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – read
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – might read this
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot – read, reluctantly, with much napping
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – read, and nearly burned it
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – read
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – read, and waved to Douglas Adams once
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – read, with a cheat sheet for the Russian nicknames
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – read
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – read
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – C.S. Lewis – read
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen – read
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis – read; isn’t this redundant to #33?
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – might read this someday
40. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne – read
41. 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
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – read
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. 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
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery – read, and the seven books that came after it
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – read
49. Lord of the Flies – William Golding – read
50. Atonement – Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi – Yann Martel – read
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 – read
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon – might read this
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – read
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – read
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – read
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – read
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
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – read
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce
76. The Inferno – Dante
77. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal – Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession – AS Byatt – might read this
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – read
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – Ian’s read this one
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 – E.B. White – read
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – read portions
90. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – read
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – read
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams – read
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 – read
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – read
100. 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…