100 books

[vilakins]

From vandonovan, another book list.

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:
How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

Really? Only six? Actually, given how few of my RL acquaintances read novels, I suppose it's a believable average.

I've read 55.

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 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 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 (Doesn't this count as part of #33?)
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 (I'm partway through this)
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

Comments

[reapermum.livejournal.com]

You've not read War and Peace? I really enjoyed it. Mind you I had time to get into the story. I'd taken it as holiday reading one year, OH and the children had streaming colds and the weather was awful. We hardly got out at all and the only thing keeping me going was Tolstoy.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I've read War and Peace twice! Damn, I thought I'd bolded it. [fixes that]

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

I've read 44! I'd avoid Memoirs of a Geisha, I thought it was rubbish. I also seem to be the only person in the world that didn't like Cloud Atlas, even though (or maybe because?) I've liked his earlier stuff. I'll never finish a list like this because of all the Dickens - I had to read two for school, and if I never read another I won't care.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I read those for school too. I daresay most Americans would bold Moby Dick for the same reason.

[toft-froggy.livejournal.com]

Probably. I've never even looked at Moby Dick - I really loathe long-winded novels.

[trixieleitz]

Only six? I've read the first six! Actually the first nine; I've completely read over forty of the list, and have started, or own with intent to read, several more.

I wonder why they listed Hamlet as well as the complete works? And I wonder why they expect people to have read them when the whole point of a play is to see it performed, imao.

[sallymn.livejournal.com]

I've finished 57 (mind you, to be fair, one of my majors at uni was in English Lit, and a fair sprinkling of these were set texts :).

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I do know people who haven't read a novel in their adult life, so maybe it works out as an average.

Exactly; they're plays! We did read Hamlet at school though, and a few others.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I was glad that several of those weren't as that's a sure way to ruin one's enjoyment of a good book. I read quite a few that other classes had as set books with uncomplicated enjoyment.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

I have read 36 of these...and at least 10 others are in the library, so at least I know ABOUT them...:-)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Most are good, but not all; see number 42 which I read on a long flight when I wasn't playing computer games. :-(

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I've read about 33. It's hard to be precise because there were one or two that I think I've read but it was so long ago that I can't be quite sure, and also because some series were included that I've read only part of so I wasn't sure whether to include them (the Sherlock Holmes stories, for instance).

I attempted to read "War and Peace" but gave up after a hundred pages or so.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Fair point; I didn't include A Suitable Boy as I'm still reading it between other books (and enjoying the other world and time).

I loved War and Peace for its characters and often its humour too, and read it twice. I found the Dickens much harder going.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

Ah, Da Vinci! I did read it but I almost laughed here and there. Have you tried M.Crichton´s Timeline? Even Jurassic Park was great, very different from the film.
Is there a similar meme about music of films?

[jhall1.livejournal.com]

I may have been unlucky with the translation of War and Peace that I read. I have a suspicion that Russian may be very difficult to translate into English, as the only other Russian novel that I've attempted to read was also very heavy going.

I attempted to read WaP because of the BBC dramatisation of some thirty years ago, which was superb - especially a young Anthony Hopkins as Pierre.

As for Dickens, I found David Copperfield very hard going. It was so very long, and Dora is arguably the most annoying character in the whole of literature. But I enjoyed Great Expectations.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Perhaps I do have a good translation. [looks] It's Rosemary Edmonds, and the photos on the cover are from that series which I do remember seeing here as a child.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I'm not that fond of thrillers; I prefer detective stories for holiday reading. What's Timeline about?

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

You haven't read His Dark Materials?!? You MUST!!!

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

No thanks. Really not my thing at all. I've also heard it has a depressing ending, so that's double no.

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

Really not my thing at all.

Any particular reason?

I don't find the ending depressing...but that's just me.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

I just heard quite a few people I know saying it annoyed them. [shrug] I just don't go for bleak and cynical.

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

I've read all of 43 of these, plus parts of the Bible and parts of the Complete Works of William Shakespeare.

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

Bleak and cynical?!? It is ANYTHING but bleak and cynical!!!

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

Here's my entries from when I first read it:

http://merrymaia.livejournal.com/tag/philip+pullman

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

Isn't it about God being evil? That was the impression I got.

[vjezkova.livejournal.com]

It is not a thriller, it is quite clever story about experimental trave to the past. A group of archeologists uncover one of those castles and attached settlements from the One Hundred War in France. They find artefacts that do not belong there and are drew into an utterly unexpected events. No mary sue, based on real history, There is also a film but again, it is only a shell of the original novel.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That sounds interesting; I shall add it to my list. :-)

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, but...God isn't God - "God" is just the first being to have acquired consciousness, didn't create the universe or anything - religion is an oppressive dictatorship but "God" isn't really in charge of it, kind of a victim, actually, being used by those really in charge to justify their own power. It's about overthrowing a dictatorship and establishing a democracy instead. Basically Blakes 7 but with a happy ending where the world is changed for the good at the end.

Pullman is pretty passionately anti-religion - or rather, anti-Christianity, since his Evil Oppressor is the Church, obsessed with Original Sin.

Pullman loves William Blake, and of course Blake wrote that Milton was "of the Devil's party without knowing it" - Pullman wanted to write a Paradise Lost story in which Authority is clearly Wrong, and the rebellion wins.

Pullman loves Blake's "Songs of Innocence and Experience" - and he wanted to make the argument that Experience is a Good Thing - growing up is a Good Thing.

So in Pullman's 'verse, everyone has a "daemon" - a physical manifestation of their soul, which takes the form of an animal. In childhood the daemon changes shape according to the person's moods and needs - it could be a butterfly one moment, a hawk the next, a cat the next, a fox the next. But at puberty the daemon "settles" into a particular form, loses the ability to change shape - it becomes fixed in a particular form (say, a cat).

In Pullman's 'verse, in the Bible, when Adam and Eve ate the apple, that was when their daemons settled. In Pullman's 'verse, the Church is obsessed with the shape-shifting daemons of children, certain that Original Sin is all about settled daemons/adulthood, and determined to find a way to keep people in the innocent state of childhood. (In the first book, the Church is doing experiments on children where they cut the bond between person and daemon, creating a zombie - Pullman manages to make it one of the most horrifying things imaginable.)

I'm an agnostic, so the anti-Christianity stuff doesn't bother me. OTOH, I've known Christians who have loved Pullman - they simply interpret it as being about oppressive authority rather than about the Christian God.

Pullman is anti-Christianity, but he has an incredible sense of WONDER. And his stories are full of awe and wonder. And he creates a world which is so rich - he creates cultures, landscapes, characters which are so REAL. The world he takes you into is a rare treat - witches who live for 1,000 years and fly on bare-armed in the icy Arctic on branches of cloud pine - armored bears whose culture is built around honor and the armor they forge themselves - the Gyptians who live in the Fens in England - two male Angels who are deeply, deeply in love with each other - tiny people who ride on the backs of dragonflies. Pullman has created some of my favorite characters of all time - Lee Scoresby, the aeronaut and Iorek Byrnison, the armored bear.

His Dark Materials is among my favorite books of all time. I cannot recommend them highly enough.

[wolfma.livejournal.com]

Someone should write a B7 version of Catch-22.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

That sounds a lot better than the impression I had of a universe with a malignant god. However I hate being preached at, and loathed Pratchett's Small Gods for that reason. I don't need to be told that the Inquisition and torture in the names of deities are bad things. I know they are. Plus all his usual humour goes out the window.

I do like the idea of the characters, daemons, armoured bears, and their universe, but I don't really want to be hit over the head about the evils of religion when it's really all about obscene abuse of power and not the core beliefs (like the words of Jesus and loving one another and treating others as you'd like them to treat you in the example of Christianity). It sounds as though it's medieval Catholicism, and frankly, that both repels and bores me. I couldn't read the Fidelma books because of all the horrible church politics and oppression. Is the good stuff enough to get past that?

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

With Avonarian, the obsessed Space Commander Space C (for Commander) Space and his desire for perfect plasma bolt patterns, 15-year-old Restle the thief who joined up to escape CF1...

[wolfma.livejournal.com]

And Space Commander Space C Space would have a collection of SpaceFix model pursuit ships he'd spend all his time arranging.

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

I would say that the good stuff is so good that it's more than worth the not-so-good stuff. But...that kind of judgment is very subjective, what works for one person might not work for someone else. So I would say: try the first book, see if you like it. (It took me about 50 pages to get into it - after that, I was hooked.)

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

He would! And Servalan is only in when she's out, and out when she has someone in, esp a decorative staff officer.

[vilakins.livejournal.com]

OK, I'll add it to the list!

[merrymaia.livejournal.com]

Yay! (And I hope you'll post about your reactions!)