The Big Read

This meme concerns the NEA Top 100 book list, via Swans on Tea and Faraday's Cage, from Abbi.

There is also a BBC Top 100 list that I might do, since I might have read more of those. They list the Harry Potter books separately, as they should. This list double counts, since Hamlet is part of the works of Shakespeare.

The rules
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you have started but haven’t finished.
3) Place an asterisk * by those you intend to read/finish someday.
4) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE. [not done]

Updated: I put a trailing "++" after the ones I really love.]

PLUS Like Swans on Tea, I put a dagger † where I've seen the movie without ever bothering to read the book, often because I've seen the movie enough to be as literate about it as those who read the book.

Wow, I've read almost one quarter of them! (Mostly not for school.)

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 [And I never intend to read the begotcha books]
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 ++
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
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 +
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
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 - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
71 † Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker +
73 † The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
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 Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle +
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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
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

Comments:

†† Yes, I have watched a lot of old movies. I've seen more than one version of some of these.

I think I was the only person in my circle who did not read #12 in HS.

I read #24 in fourteen days flat, the library loan period, including all of the essays at the back of the Norton Critical Edition. I've read parts of some of these in the original foreign language.

But where the heck is Rabbit Run? or Heart of Darkness? [Oops. Found it and fixed it.] Not to mention Physics by Halliday and Resnick? How can you read the Bible and not read the 2nd edition "blue bible"? Its opening is at least as enchanting as that of David Copperfield. I mean, how can "Chapter 1: I Am Born" compare to "Chapter 1: Measurement"? The latter features the failure of the first transatlantic cable because the company building it had ignored the careful new experimental measurements made by its hired engineering consultant, William Thomson (aka Lord Kelvin). That story, along with Lord Kelvin's view that "when you can measure what you are speaking about,and express it in numbers, you know something about it", is a great way to kick off a fine piece of technical literature.