LIZ FIELDING

TOP HUNDRED BOOKS

This comes courtesy of Kate Hardy (who got it from Michelle Styles.)

Apparently the average adult has only read 6 of these top 100 books. Idea is:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (I can't find anywhere to underline on my blog so I'm adding a note)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (well, yes...)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (loved it)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (well, the first four, the size of # 5 stopped me in my tracks -- I read in bed!)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee(fabulous)
6 The Bible (I'm of an age where it was compulsory)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (loved it)
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'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (great fun)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (the dh keeps telling I should)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (lost interest fairly early)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (wept buckets at the end)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (loved it)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (loved it)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (am I the only person in the world who didn't get it?)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (loved it)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (loved it)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen (loved it)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (loved it)
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 (very involving)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (:) )
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (this was because I kept hearing about it. Loathed it)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (loved, loved, loved it)
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
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (oh, yes!)
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 (wept buckets, but I 'd seen Dirk Bogarde play Sydney Carton in the film which made it personal!)
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 (wonderful)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (the dd loved this but I reeled back from it when she was telling me the story)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (I struggled with Hardy)
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (great stuff)
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 (not a chance!)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (Coots forever!)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (fabulous)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (I know I had a copy but can't remember reading it)
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 (loved it)
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 (read it while in hospital expecting the s&h)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (I think I read everything Shute wrote. The Trustee from the Toolroom was my favourite)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well, I've read a lot of those books -- although there are some shocking omissions (I seem to have missed a chunk of the French writers) -- but most were so long ago that I'm struggling to remember when and where. It is a slightly skewed list, but then how could you possibly choose the top hundred books? And how on earth did some of them sneak in there? The Da Vinci Code? Please! There are a gazillion better books.