The book list....

[gwendolyngrace]

I'm always a little embarrassed by these book lists because I really haven't read many classics - I've seen film versions and/or I've read excerpts, but actually read through the whole thing? Not a lot. I try. I really do. But authors like Austen, Dickens, Hardy - they take a long time. I never had time in school because I'm a slowish reader (I love language too much to rush) and I always had to give up in order to read my school assignments. (Also, I note this is a British list, but where's Mark Twain?)

However. In honour of the day,
Bold indicates you've read it, Italic you want to read it (and I'll add a Bold/Italic for tried and/or read excerpts):

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen - I have multiple versions of the film and I've seen my friend Amanda's musical version twice!
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte - Um.. does the musical count?
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Bible - I've read all the important books, anyway. Not ever cover-to-cover, but close enough.
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. 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, William Shakespeare - I've read most everything, anyway, including the ones that are attributed but can't be proved.
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier - Does the film count?
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
19. The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot - Another one where I got bogged down in the middle
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell - my mother read this book in one day when she was a teen. I've never found the time.
22. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh - After seeing the BBC production I want to plow through this for teh gay
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 wanna know why this is different from the OTHER Chronicles of Narnia (#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, 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 - Love the CBC productions with Megan Follows, *hated* the books
47. Far from the Maddening Crowd, Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies, William Golding - And I try to forget the experience
50. Atonement, Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi, Yann Martel
52. Dune, Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons - Saw the movie recently, didn't leave me wanting the book
54. Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikrem 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, Emil Zola - If you have not read this, do yourselves a favour and put it on your list. It's a horrible, heart-breaking, depressing story - but the ending is SO WELL WRITTEN. Well, the whole thing, really. It's beautifully told.
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 Alborn
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 - En Francais, tout alors!
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 - The BBC production was so torturous, I don't know if I could stand to read it.
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare - Um, again... why its own entry, when it's included in the Complete Works (#14)??
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo - I think I still have a bookmark somewhere in my copy.

Thirty-one out of 100, not counting the ones I've tried to read and either lost interest or had to give up or whatever. And a bunch more that are O_O inspiring. (The DaVinci Code!? Really??)

But counting ones that I at least know the Cliff's Notes version....71. More respectable, anyway.