Have You Read These Books?

[Nissa Annakindt]

Writers are people who read a lot. And while people have different tastes in reading, there are some books generally considered worth reading by all.

On writer Karina Fabian's blog fabianspace.blogspot.com, I found a list of books put out by the BBC. Karina bolded the ones she'd read, italicized those she'd started but not finished, and challenged others to do the same, which I did on my own blog linalamont.blogspot.com

Now, I don't necessarily agree with this list as being purely good reading. Some are just best-sellers. And there is some duplication as the Narnia series is one listing and the first book in the Narnia series is another.

But, here is the list. How many have you read?

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 1984--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 Hitchhicker'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

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

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 - Kazu 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

[Quatermass]

I'll delete the ones that I haven't read all the way through (although I have read a substantial proportion, at least a quarter, of the Bible).


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (HS)

8 1984--George Orwell

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (HS)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (Best Dickens book I have read to date)

25 The Hitchhicker's Guide to the Galaxy--Douglas Adams

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (HS)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

52 Dune - Frank Herbert (Best science fiction book ever)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (HS)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Read A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four)

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (It's crap)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

So, I've read maybe a fifth of the books on the list. The books above marked 'HS' means that I read them in high school for English (with the exception of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which I only remember vaguely reading all the way through of my own volition in high school), and don't remember that much about them.

It's a good list, but I want to add a few of my own. Not always popular books, or even well known, at least until recently.

Let the Right One In

This is a horror novel, and a disturbing one. We'll put that out there. But for those of you who are willing to stomach a lot of nasty stuff, there is, beneath it all, a very touching and beautiful story about a boy and a vampire, and their friendship. By John Ajvide Lindqvist.


The Vorkosigan Saga

A science-fiction series by Lois McMaster Bujold, about (mostly) the exploits of unlikely hero, the brittle-boned hunchbacked Miles Vorkosigan. Despite the military action and conspiracy thriller stories, these novels also have an underlying level of humour as well that is at its best in the romantic comedy A Civil Campaign.


Doctor Who: Lungbarrow

Hard to find, but if you are a fan of Doctor Who, you should try and find this story (just don't try eBay), which goes back to the origins of the Doctor, and the house where he was 'born'. By Marc Platt.


Monster

A manga series by Naoki Urasawa, this is an excellent thriller that is part Silence of the Lambs, and part The Fugitive. A brilliant neurosurgeon goes on the run after he is blamed for the murders committed by a young man he saved as a boy.


House of Leaves

A psychological horror novel by Mark Z Danielewski that is, at its base, about a mysterious house that is becoming far bigger on the inside than the outside. But it is also about the people annotating this report, and who are slowly going mad in the process...


The Princess Bride

This classic novel is to Ruritanian romance what House of Leaves is to psychological horror. Annotated, wry, and blurs the line between fiction and reality. By William Goldman.