A post I recently read claims that the average American adult has read only six of the top 100 books ever written. I’m not sure who put this list together, or what (if any) significance there is in the numbering, but I thought this would be fun. Try your hand at the list.
The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) (NEW RULE) Put ! by ones that you have seen in movie form
6) Post. (Don’t forget to tag me.)
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 ! (* for some of them)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee%
6 The Bible **
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 1984 – 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 (* many but not all, and !)
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 (! for the PBS versions – have read the first two)
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 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 *
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 – 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
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 **
I’ve actually read 27 of them… but I am a bit ashamed of my lack of reading. I need to set aside time to read each week I’ve decided.
Matt Kelley
September 27, 2008 at 7:48 pmI think this list should have included some of the books we read in Div School. I mean, who can be a productive member of society without having read “A Plain Account of Christian Perfection”?