Reading information based on a random sample of 100 books
Explanatory legend:
- bolded read
- underlined liked
- italicized will read
plus a couple bonus notations:
- [would not read on a bet]
- What? That's a BOOK? Never heard of the author or of said book (?)
Annotated list:
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 (well, 3/4th would be more correct: there are some obscure parts of it, like... the Revelations which I skimmed, just like I skimmed some of the pages that go on and on about Saul son of Saul, son of Saul etc. lived 790 years etc. I don't think checking the page and turning it really counts as reading)
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 (again, 3/4th only: never read the poetry, only the plays)
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 - C.S. Lewis (isn't that part of the Narnia Chronicles, so one gets double credit?)
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' 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 (isn't that already included in his complete works above? Do I get double credit? Cool!)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Question marks (?) indicate the books I've never heard of and therefore cannot judge and allocate to a category such as:
- 'interested in reading'
- 'probably not'
- 'certainly not'
From which one can conclude that for all other books which I am aware of that are included -apparently arbitrarily- in this top 100 list, there is an actual reason I have not read them. Besides lack of free time, of course. eg, Lolita: I have skimmed through the book quickly and while I recognize the value and interest of it, I made the educated choice not to immerse myself in this horribly depressing story. Thank God it was not required reading for any class I ever attended.
Note: only 8 titles are italicized, and it is worth noting that most of them have been in that status for years; the Chronicles of Narnia, which I am about to start reading, have been on my to-read list for over 10 years... Shame, shame.
So I guess now is a good time for a couple of quick recommendations, right?
(1) The Dragon Never Sleeps by Glen Cook has just come out in a new, beautiful trade paperback edition. If you have not read it before, run to your nearest bookstore and pick it up: it is a lot easier to get into and much more immediately rewarding than the Black Company books and I highly recommend it.
It's like a space opera, macho version of the West Wing -not that I've ever watched the West Wing- crossed over with Dallas. Comparable to what I hear the new version of Battlestar Galactica is like. Lots of complex political, social, personal and sexual intrigue, a page turner for those who like their space opera adult, as opposed to the Star Wars heroic and simplistic kind.
(2) Also by Glen Cook but still available in its original paperback edition, The Tower of Fear is a very different fantasy-type novel and one of the best of this genre.
(3) I am right now finishing Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels -the first of which is Master and Commander- and I can only add my voice to the general chorus of approval: if you have not read these, you have a real treat in front of you!
One which -considering the sheer number of these novels (20)- should keep you enjoyably occupied for months. And the advantage of this series being so popular is that these books are freely available from your public library systems.