books I have read

I saw this list on another blog I sometimes read, and I was curious about my own literary habits. I don't normally participate in anything resembling a chain letter or mass forwarding of emails, but I got a real kick out of doing this, so I decided to share it here.

This was a list of the top 100 selling books published by (some publishing house). The original post said that the average American adult had not read 10 of these books. So, I wanted to check. I have read 52 and have serious plans for at least two more of them.

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) Post.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
**4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (I’ve read them in two languages)
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible (the whole thing too, all 63 books)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May 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 - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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- C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (I was confused by this one until I remembered the list is compiled of top selling books published at this house. This book is sold separately and as part of a series - it makes the top 100 in both forms go CS Lewis!)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
*41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
#42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (I read it in Spanish, but was still singularly unimpressed)
*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 - L.M. 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 - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. 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 - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (all of them)
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 (And I have played 5 different roles in this play as well)
**99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
**100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo