A lot of my friends have filled out this list from the BBC. So, I thought I’d give a shake at it.
Here’s how it works:
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE. (A long with others, I’m boldly italicizing ones I love.)
4. Reprint this list in your blog.
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Bible – I guess I have to love it, don’t I?
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – I feel so validated. I thought I was obligated to love this book, but I’m finding out all my friends hated it, too.
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare – The complete works?? Eh. No.
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald One of the few books I was compelled to read in high school that I actually liked.
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – Did. Not. Enjoy. It.
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Did. Not. Enjoy. It.
- Atonement – Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
- Dune – Frank Herbert – Seen the movie. Sting was in it! Counts? No?
- Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens I have a confession to make. I got halfway through this and gave up and read the Cliff’s Notes. Pretty sure I failed that test in World History.
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Seen the movie. Adriene has the book. Not sure it really is a “classic?”
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville – Maybe someday.
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – Read “A Walk In the Woods” by Bryson. His tone and demeanor in the book really turned me off on him. Not really interested in reading more by him.
- Ulysses – James Joyce – Perhaps? I’ve heard good things about it.
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
- Germinal – Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession – AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web – EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery That was a LONG time ago.
- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
- Watership Down – Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare – I’ve also read Andy Coan’s adaption where he turned all of the characters in the story into my fraternity brothers!
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – Saw the play. Counts? No?
That you’ve not read HHGttG either makes me feel better about myself.