The Big Read

Tangobaby tagged me with this fun meme. She knows that reading makes me happy. If you would like to play along, please consider yourself tagged.


The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. Who cares? This was just fun to do, is all. Plus, I want to see yours.

• Look at the list and bold those you have read.
• Italicize those you intend to read.
• Underline the books you love.
• Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
• Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott(I loathe it, though. I know that's practically unAmerican. Please don't hate me. Please come visit me again.)
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (A little less than half is bold because I've read a little less than 1/2 of his complete works)
15. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (I didn't finish, too hard to follow. Plus, Jeffrey says the ending is sad, sad, sad. No thanks. )
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I tried, Nancy. I really did.)
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ("No freaking way. " ~ Tangobaby. Ditto, TB)
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 - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captian 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 (Actually, I am dying to read this one. I totally loved The Moonstone!)
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery (I tried and tried and tried. Yawn.)
47. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy(One sentence of Hardy is enough for anybody.)
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (hated this!!)
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 (ICK!)
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (How do you double underline? Love, love, love this book!)
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 (You'll think me a philistine, but I won't read this book. I know the ending.)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (Blech! Do you actually know the premise of this book? I couldn't do it. I tried.)
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Puh Leeze! Try Neil Cassidy instead. Much better.)
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (Skip her second one. It stunk as badly as the second movie.)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (You're kidding me, right?)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (This book on in my top 10 all-time best list.)
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (Really. I have. ...Ok. I admit it. It was for a college class.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (She had me for a while, but I thought the book lost its power from about the middle on. In the end, I thought it turned out to be over-rated and self-important.)
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt (I thought the movie was pretty good. The book was difficult to follow and I gave up because the writing quality just wasn't worth all the effort.)
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 (Again with the sad endings. Try Stuart Little instead.)
88. The Five People You Met In Heaven - Mitch Ablom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (too wrenching and sad for me)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (Ick and double ICK!)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (gotta read it for the title alone)
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 (Well, I loved parts of it. I also skipped a few of the social commentary parts of it.)

Happy blogging. Happy reading.



The beautiful book photos were taken by Zsaj and me*voila.