Great books meme

[dreamflower]

Gacked from pegkerr :

To mark the tenth anniversary of World Book Day, a survey has been conducted to find the ten books the nation cannot live without. Over 2000 people voted online, which resulted in the following top 100.

I'm bolding the ones I've read and italicizing the ones I'd like to read.


1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien (So many re-reads I've lost count)
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Bible (But not all at one go!)
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman (loved the first book, was confused by the second, and hated the third)
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 (Not the *complete* works, but many of them)
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
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
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
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
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck ( Can’t be sure. I think I read it for school, but I might only have seen the movie.)
29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy ( Another one I’m not sure of--books that I *had* to read for school never stuck with me too well.)
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 (That's part of the Chronicles of Narnia!)
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 (barely skimmed because my mother insisted I read it. There’s better written fiction on ff.net.)
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 Madden Crowd, Thomas Hardy (Uh…Why is that spelled wrong? “madding”, thank you.)
48. The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood (I started this once, but it was a borrowed copy, and I never got around to finishing it before I gave it back.)
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, 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 (an all-time favorite. I love 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
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
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, Alexander Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare (this one is on here twice too...)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

Not too shabby, I suppose, considering. But a lot of books I would *think* should be on the list aren't...

Comments

[baranduin.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'd heard about that poll and was wondering which one came out first! OK, would prefer LOTR first but P&P is not too shabby a choice, not at all :-)

[addie71.livejournal.com]

Interesting list. I counted 34 of these that I have read, unfortunately some so long ago I really don't remember much about them!

[gamgeefest.livejournal.com]

Well, there's a bunch of books I'm never gonna read. :P

The Color Purple only came in #83 while Hitchhikers came in #25??? Proof that only cyber-geeks voted on this poll. ;)

[elandulin.livejournal.com]

I count 50 that I've read. It's kind of an interesting list, very diverse! My children were named for two of them: Tess of the D'urbervilles and Anne of Green Gables.

[melilot-hill.livejournal.com]

I've read about 18 books on that list. Not that many. Perhaps I've read some in the Dutch translation and don't recognise the English title. Who knows :-P
I'm glad to see there's a book by John Irving on the list too. I love his books and they are in fact the first books I read in English just for fun and not for my English class.