52 (now 53)

A friend posted this on my facebook page. Play along and give me your number in the comments. See my thoughts on this below ...

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses. :)


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
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’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 - 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

These lists are silly. This one made me feel pretty good.

Who is the BBC to decide which 100 books should or shouldn't be read?

Whether or not I agree with this list, I am proud that I have read (all or parts of) these 52 books. 

Twenty-on have been attempted or completed since college.

I have never even heard of thirteen of these.

I never intend to read six of them.

Four are on my list for next year.

My 11 years old has read 13 of them.

New Year

Already. It is only November, but I have come up with a reading project for next year.

Each month of 2011, I will read that book. You know the one that you were supposed to read in high school or in college and that is referenced and referred to in other classic and modern works of literature, but that just somehow got away from you. Yeah, THAT book. Here are the 12 I have chosen:

Ulysses
Madame Bovary
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Mrs. Dalloway
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Their Eyes Were Watching God
Absalom, Absalom!
Moby Dick
Vanity Fair
Invisible Man
Doctor Zhivago
Farewell to Arms

Most of these, by the way, are sitting on my library bookshelf. Two just arrived this week from Amazon.

All of these, except Doctor Zhivago, are on The Novel 100 list, but that is not why I picked them. Interesting to note however, that a number of books that I finished this year are also on the list including, Middlemarch, Great Expectations, Don Quixote, and War and Peace. Some are long time favorites including Huck Finn, Lolita and Pride and Prejudice.

Oh yes, lest I forget, my 11 yo son and I will also be reading The Hobbit. Yet another one that got away!

Hopefully, I will have time to throw in some lighter reading as well. You know, The Atlantic or The Bible? Please tell me you get the sarcasm.

Bad Habit

I have a bad habit.

Ever since I purchased Amazon Prime last year, I buy books without even giving them a second thought. No waiting for them to arrive at the library for me. I don't even have to wait for my total to equal $25 to qualify for free standard shipping. Any book. Any time. Free two day shipping. My latest purchases are due to arrive Tuesday.

Thanks to Girl Detective, I followed a few links to New Century Reading and Nonsuch Books. After reading a few posts I decided I had to have Doctor Zhivago. A few more clicks and I was at Amazon where I could buy that AND Madame Bovary. People buy these books together. So I guess I should too. $40. But free shipping.

But when the hell am I going to read them? Maybe I will wrap them up and put them under the tree. They look like good January books.