Friday, January 23, 2009

The Top 100 Books of All Time

Apparently this is a list of the top 100 books you should read in your lifetime. Let's see how good I've done...

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki - read parts of this in my Japanese Civilizations class!
90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac - the only reason I know this author's name is because he is a character in the Tales of Alvin Maker...which should be on this list.
85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
83 Germinal by Emile Zola
82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
68 Crash by JG Ballard
67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
59 London Fields by Martin Amis
58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood - I think I've read part of this so I bolded a letter
52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
50 Beloved by Toni Morrison - love Toni Morrison and will read this
49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck - movie ;)
48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
47 The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
38The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins - I think I was supposed to read this for one of the English classes I took in Ireland but didn't even buy it because there were so many
24 Ulysses by James Joyce
23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
21 1984 by George Orwell - on my list
20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells - saw the movie...
18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens - I have an incredibly old copy of this (very early edition) and will read it one day
12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen - one of my favorites! I'm making my way through all of Jane Austen's novels, although I have currently only reread this and Sense and Sensibility
10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes - will read it one day
9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë - definitely on my list!
6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - I HATE THIS BOOK.
4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville - on my list; I'll get to it one day/never
1 Middlemarch by George Eliot

10/100...10.1/100 if you include the small amount I've read of The Handmaiden's Tale. I FAIL. How did you do?

2 comments:

Spotted Sparrow said...

You've never read the Lord of the Rings????? You are totally fired!

The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Les Misérables by Victor Hugo (in French, even!)
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
1984 by George Orwell
The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (damn, this is a loooong book, but I got through it)
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville

23/100 - now I'll have inspiration when I run out of English books to read. :)

Unknown said...

umm...I read The Hobbit in 8th grade...