On Reading

Lately I have realised that I read less than I used to and I rarely read anything that's not contemporary.

Here's a list that originally came from the BBC and more recently from Nelly.  Apparently you are meant to copy the list and then bold the books you have read in their entirety and italicize those that you have partly read or dipped into. In my view there is quite a bit of dross in this list quite a lot of which I've actually read.The average person has read 6 of these books. 

So here's my list:

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 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

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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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 - 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
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 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 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 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

I've read 66 of the books pn this list and started, or dipped into, another 12 or so.  More on this later.

 

Comments

[Nelly]

I think you'd enjoy the Pullman books.

[fifi]

yes The Pulman Books are great.

I did try to read my way through the entire bible many years ago, but gave up half way through.

I also gave up on Tolkien, both of them. Can't stand them.

[Annette]

Hah -- I just went down to the "Comments" section to say that you might like the Pullman books (well, at least the first one -- I found Nr 3 quite disappointing) but I see that I'm not the first one to say so. Funny: I originally found this blog because of books -- I googled Hamilton's "Speckled People", and your blog came up, and I've been hooked ever since. Oh, and be grateful you haven't read "The Kite Runner" yet -- don't bother.

[ganching]

Fifi you must like some parts of the bible?

Hello Annette. I think I may have read a page or two of the first Pullman while staying overnight in a friend's house but it didn't immediately grab me.

I read Tolkien when I was a teenager and it was a real slog. I only read because I thought it was cool. I also started reading too many of the classics when I was too young. I am going to start again with them when I retire and/or lose my job.

A person who shall remain nameless (let's call him Tay Brake) hasn't read any Dickens at all but has read The Kite Runner and the Dan Brown. this amuses me greatly when I think about it.

[David]

I doubt if I could even get up to forty titles. Like you, my taste tends to the modern but I also feel that the older classics seem too daunting and my lifestyle won't allow me to give them the concentration they deserve. As a child, I also decided never to read Dickens. There were so many films or TV adaptations at the time, not to mention the musical. Not only did the suffering of all his poor little protagonists scare the hell out of me, turning their misery into a series of jolly little song-n-dance numbers put me off for life.

[emmdee]

Not sure if I can get near 66, but pleased to see that there are only a few I don't know of... Find it hard to imagine being that 'average person' and only having read 6 (or less), what a dull world that would be. I think I beat that before I finished secondary school.
Think you might like Life of Pi too.