February 26, 2009

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...

1 Comments:

Blogger Ian Gilman said...

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.

5:10 PM  

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