woke up in london yesterday;
Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. 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'Ubervilles - 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 Traveler’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 Hitchhiker'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
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 - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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
If you've got any recommendations from the list, let me know! I'm planning on rereading Doyle and Pullman, and then probably going to try and finish up some of the italics of the books I just forgot to keep reading, like Lolita, maybe start some more Austen THAT IS NOT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, dabble in the curious case etc etc
That being said, some of my recommendations! Middlemarch is super big and long and heavy, but it reads like a countryside Dickens, which means pretty nice to read overall! The size might be daunting, but I can't say it was a bad read. One Hundred Years of Solitude and A Prayer for Owen Meany are both good reads, and I'm pleased they made the list. Dune is great if you like sci-fi, but I've read another one of Kazuo Ishiguro's work and I also highly recommend him, for his style and creative storytelling. I hope I can read his other work too haha crying
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. 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'Ubervilles - 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 Traveler’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 Hitchhiker'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
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 - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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
If you've got any recommendations from the list, let me know! I'm planning on rereading Doyle and Pullman, and then probably going to try and finish up some of the italics of the books I just forgot to keep reading, like Lolita, maybe start some more Austen THAT IS NOT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, dabble in the curious case etc etc
That being said, some of my recommendations! Middlemarch is super big and long and heavy, but it reads like a countryside Dickens, which means pretty nice to read overall! The size might be daunting, but I can't say it was a bad read. One Hundred Years of Solitude and A Prayer for Owen Meany are both good reads, and I'm pleased they made the list. Dune is great if you like sci-fi, but I've read another one of Kazuo Ishiguro's work and I also highly recommend him, for his style and creative storytelling. I hope I can read his other work too haha crying
no subject
I am here to say that The Time Traveler's Wife is extremely poignant and touching. It might seem like a sci fi romp from the title, but it actually reads more like realistic fiction, dealing with the consequences of a man who often becomes temporally displaced against his will and his relationship with his wife, whom he first met when he was an adult and she was a little girl.
I would also recommend The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which is also poignant, but more deliberate and anvilicious about it so that it kinda detracts from the effects a little bit. You know the point is that it's going to be a feel-good story because the build-up is so obvious. But it still makes you feel good anyway.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is maddening to me. It's written from the point of view as a boy with autism or Asperger's disease, but by many accounts it is not a very accurate portrayal of the thought processes of an actual person with such a disorder. The main character is, in my opinion, extremely unlikeable with few redeeming personality traits, and it gives the impression that everyone with autism has no emotions apart from selfishness, which I feel is somewhat insulting. ANYWAY, that is just my opinion, a lot of people like it a lot because it is admittedly a very strong effort to describe the world of an autistic person, and as far as I know, few other authors have made such an endeavor.
no subject
but ty for the recs! i'm excited to read the time traveler's wife and i'm glad to hear that it's so realistic, since it was just on my backburner because i was afraid it'd just be a romcom though there is nothing wrong with that!! but now i'm far more eager to read that... the five people in heaven thing i was avoiding because IT LOOKS LIKE IT WOULD MAKE ME CRY but if it's feel good well then that is okay ;u;
that's good to keep in mind if i ever read the incident, hmmm... i vaguely heard that before, but i only really know about its plot, which i found interesting but now idk, since i do have strong feelings about that hgngghh... well i can always put it down i guess!!
though i would be impressed if wighty actually finished dune it is so big i could kick it and hurt my big toe
no subject
......Anyway the point is I suck at reading adult books too. =P Good thing Charlotte's Web is on that list!
The Time Traveler's Wife isn't really a romcom, although it does have humorous sections! It's a little bit depressing, actually... But yeah. The Five People in Heaven probably will make you cry! And then you will feel good because heaven is a good place and everyone feels better when they go to heaven and stuff.
I have finished Dune! You mean just the book? I have read the book, and one of the sequels but not the whole series.
no subject
*feels like a well read loser*
Actually, I'm meaning to read Lolita again sometime soon. It would be great if we could do it book club style with other people.
no subject
i was actually talking about that with someone else, how book clubs could be really fun i think, it is just hard to coordinate online and stuff... and which books would be chosen too haha
no subject
no subject
if you have ran on your plurk or dw or w/e then she had some interest in doing that!! and some suggestions for books too what a butt!! but yeah i suggested it to her like a year ago or something so we could read
lolita together
everything comes together
no subject
no subject
ugh seconding what wighty said about time traveler's wife and five people you meet in heaven UGHUHGUHGH i should finish the latter w o w i suck at reading books really don't mind me
but now i will have to read the curious incident too because i have a brother who has asperger's...
Atonement gets meta somewhere in the middle heh and I hated Briony! But all in all I guess it's okay. The movie made her a more sympathetic character so I don't know if I would recommend it!
What is there to recommend to you anyway you are like the Akashic records I am not talking to you
no subject
i think i heard that about before which is weird haha... that the movie makes her more sympathetic i mean, that is just strange mindmeld!! but i guess if you are halfway recommending it to me anything yana chooses is good
I AM MISSING A LOT i need to read more austen and anything yana likes such as the time travler's wife and five people yeaaaaahhhh
no subject
I'm 24 books behind you
no subject
though i stick by what i said like twenty years ago, owen meany seems like a book that you'd like!! it has a sense of humor about adult situations
no subject
no subject
i think you'd like it because it's pretty thoughtful about theology but also just has this sense of humor running through it, like shenanigans happen during their childhood that's just really absurd and there's just this surreal quality to the text, like in the life of pi but in an american setting
no subject
no subject
no subject
Also, this list needs more Oscar Wilde, gosh.
no subject
i should read madame bovary though except i'm a little sad because whenever i hear the name i keep on thinking it's like a book about a mother cow
it never is
no subject
We always talked about Madame Bovary's ovaries. Rip-snorting good time wot.