A Reading List

I'm having one of those book slumps again. I wonder why I've had so many of them this year? I want to read a classic but I can't seem to choose the right one. Today, I saw this reading list at Thomas at My Porch's blog  . The BBC believe most people would have read 6 of these. I've read 44. No wonder I can't choose my next classic. I've put the ones I've read in red and the ones I've partially read in italics. I've enjoyed many of them but I've added an asterisk next to the ones I really loved. 

So how many have you read? Based on the list, if you've got recommendations for me, please do drop me a comment below. Plus, while we're at it, can you tell me what's the best book you've read so far this year? I'm starting to think of my top ten list for 2010 and it somehow isn't as great as my 2009 list. I need to read a good book before the New Year!
 
* 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
 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 The Complete Works of Shakespeare
 *15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
 *18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
 19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
 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 - A.A. 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 Inferno - Dante  
 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 - E.B. 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

Comments

  1. For two short not real rough holiday season reads not in red yet for you try-The Great Gatsby-the last ten pages are just totally beautiful-Brave New World-I still recall the book in detail after 40 plus years ago-

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  2. I really loved the Great Gatsby when I read it earlier this year. I've read (or partically read)32 of that list which isn't too bad.

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  3. @mel & @jessica - Looks like I'll have to pick up The Great Gatsby. I actually have a copy but I don't know why I've never read it. Funny because Tender is the Night by Fitzgerald is one of my favorite novels.

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  4. You haven't read any of my favourites on the list! Anne of Green Gables! Emma! Vanity Fair!

    As for my favourite books of the year, I loved: The Rehearsal by Eleanor Catton, Lunch in Paris by Elizabeth Bard, the Mrs Tim books by D.E. Stevenson, A Long, Long Time Ago and Essentially True by Brigid Pasulka, and Greenery Street by Denis Mackail. It's been a good reading year!

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  5. I've made it through 49 - nearly half the list. I don't really understand the list at all, though... It's a weird mishmash of books, isn't it?

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  6. I've read 50, a pleasingly round number, although a few of them I really wish I hadn't bothered with! You must read the Great Gatsby although I actually think Tender is the Night and the Beautiful and Damned are both better.
    One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece, and I recently read A Tale of Two Cities and absolutely loved it. It is a fantastic story and the imagery it conjures up of the French revolution, of London, of Paris, of night-time carriage rides and bars in basements are almost unbeatable. I was surprised by how readable and gripping it was. Am now planning to read some more Dickens!

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  7. I think I only counted 23 so I can look forward to reading quite a few more. Guess I won't have any trouble thinking of what to read next!

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  8. Read another Dickens!!!
    ps. In my opinion don't bother with Cloud Atlas, unless others whose reading tastes you know you share rave about it.

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  9. Great Expectations is one of my favorites from the unreads on your list - love it, love it, love it. I've read 65 of them, but I'm never going to get 100% because Confederacy of Dunces and I just DON'T get along. :-)

    Best book of the year so far: possibly the first volume of Simone de Beauvoir's memoirs (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter in English).

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  10. I've read 32 from the list. So far this year, one of my favorite reads has been Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys.

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  11. @Claire (The Captive Reader) Thanks! More books to add to my list.

    @Steph - On second thought, it is a weird list...the Da Vinci Code, Bill Bryson??! I'll have to find another list online.

    @Jane & @Joan Hunter Dunn - I'm going to try A Tale of Two Cities!

    @Emily - I actually like A Confederacy of Dunces. Weird but fun in a way.

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  12. I've read a nice even number: 50 of them, and I find it so terribly sad that the BBC says people have only read 6. Poor illiterate world...

    Don't you love the classics?! They're my favorite in all the world, and I'm so glad to see that you've read The Secret History. For some bizarre reason, that's I book I'm crazy about. Murder, go figure.

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  13. Mrs. B., I can recommend Middlemarch, A Town Like Alice, War and Peace, A Fine Balance, Gone with the Wind, and, definitely, before any of the others, Anne of Green Gables.
    As for my favourite book of the year, that's a tough one. I think it's better to give a list of my favourites: A Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, The Home-Maker by Dorothy Canfield Fisher, The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim, The Crowded Street by Winifred Holtby, A Town like Alice by Nevil Shute, Little Boy Lost by Marghanita Laski, I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, Middlemarch by George Eliot, Good to a Fault by Marina Endicott, Illyrian Spring by Ann Bridge, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith, Life and Death of Harriett Frean by May Sinclair, and The Rector's Daughter by F. M. Mayor. Plus, I would also add They Were Sisters by Dorothy Whipple; even though I've read most of her other novels this year except for High Wages and Every Good Deed, and they were all excellent, that one was my favourite. I feel like I've read many good books this year, and some of them have been because of your recommendations. :)

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  14. @Belleza - The Secret History is one of my favorite books of all time. Definitely top five.

    @Virginia - You've indeed had a fabulous reading year which is much more than I can say for myself. Thanks so much for all your recommendations. There are many on that list that I haven't read. They Were Sisters is also my favorite Whipple and I'm happy to hear that I've recommended some good ones to you.

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  15. 27. That's how many I read from that list. Why not try The Lord of the Rings and Dune.

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  16. Wow that's some list! What suggestions do I have to offer? Hmmm...you could read some satirical work on the early twentieth century: cold comfort farm or maybe some Evelyn Waugh....if you haven't already :)

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  17. Sorry to spam but I see that you have already read cold comfort farm, try Emma before the new year :)

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  18. 63? No wonder I have no life...

    Try Middlemarch :)

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  19. When you're in the mood for a warm and wonderful book--perhaps while you are on summer vacation--try the phenomenal Swallows and Amazons series by Ransome. The first one (S&A) is a perfect place to start. Winter Holiday is my second favorite in the series. You can share with children if you like, too.

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  20. I just can't wait to hear what you think of "Faithful Place!" I think Tana French is a goddess. Did you read "The Likeness?" I thought it had heavenly echoes of Du Maurier....

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  21. I've got another one for you, Mrs. B -- I cannot recommend highly enough a memoir called "The Hare with Amber Eyes." Possibly the best book I read this year. Moving, thought-provoking, beautifully written.

    Oh, and your NYRB challenge continues to influence: my husband just read "Indian Summer" and I just finished Stefan Zweig's "The Post Office Girl" which Danielle of A Work in Progress blogged about.

    Thx for your comment on Book Group of One!

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