A book list!

[firecat]

via treacle_well

The Guardian's Top 100 Books You Can't Live Without

Disclaimer: I think "top X books" lists are pretty much bullshit, and Guardian ones especially so, and this one is no exception.

The ones I've read are in bold. The ones I started and didn't finish are in italic. I welcome recommendations and dis-recommendations of ones I haven't read.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (An all-time favorite)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (Another all-time favorite)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I read the beginning and end but skipped most of the middle.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (OK, I must be missing something, but I read this recently and couldn't stand it. I'm like, "If I wanted to read all about people abusing each other, I could go read LiveJournal.")
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (What's this doing here? Is it really so fabulous?)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the d'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy (No, but I did listen to Return of the Native, if only because it's read by Alan Rickman.)
13 Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (I really didn't like this. That seems to surprise most people.)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – William Shakespeare (I've read some of the plays and sonnets; I'm weakest in the historical plays.)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks (Never heard of it.)
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (Didn't like it at all.)
19 The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (Never heard of it.)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
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
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (I hated this, but I recently heard that a new and much better translation is available.)
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 (My favorite Dickens out of the ones I've read)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (My second-favorite Austen)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (Umm...why is this in here twice?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Really?)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin – Louis de Bernières (Never heard of it.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (I confess to having enjoyed it up until the last 50 pages or so, but it so doesn't belong on a list of books you can't live without.)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA 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 (Ugh.)
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding (I think this would have worked better as a rock opera than as a book. Hmm....)
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan (Never heard of it.)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (Never heard of it.)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (I like it quite a bit, but it's another odd addition to the list of 100 essential books)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (My favorite Austen. And not just because Alan Rickman has a part in the movie.)
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 (I'm a gushing fangirl of this book)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson (Cute, but...)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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 – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
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 (Very influential)
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 (because it's not, you know, part of the complete works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Misérables – Victor Hugo

Comments

[kmd.livejournal.com]

Oh! And "Possession" by A.S. Byatt rocks, too.