Reading List

“Big Read”‘s 100-Book List
kirabug — stolen from peri-renna’s site.

If you choose, look through the following list of books and:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) * Put a star next to the ones you’ve only partially read.
5) Strikethrough the ones you refuse to read.
6) Reprint this list in your own LJ (or in my case, the blog).

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 Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

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

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 – AA Milne

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (I own it, does that count for anything?)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude

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 (own that too)

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 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

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

Not a bad showing, if I do say so myself.

Traveling

It’s just after noon on the day after Christmas. The sky’s white, and the wind is cold, and a small dog is sleeping next to me on the sofa, with her nose tucked in under my knee.

I have much to do. The router needs rebooting. There’s work in the second bedroom to be done before January when visitors and snowstorms will both guarantee occupation at some point or another. There’s a kitchen to clean, gifts to put away, and we need to find a place to put the tree until next year.

Instead, I read. Bradbury. Quicker than the Eye. I’m transported from this place to that – a farmhouse in Massachusetts, a library, the old roads below the highway, Dog’s funeral. And my own bookshelf, where books read and unread mingle, and swell in ranks.

We received another bookcase for Christmas – a blessing – and I look forward to tearing all the books off their shelves again and moving the books stacked on the floor next to the shelves and at the foot of the steps to proper places. Usually, my husband rearranges them quite clinically, sorted by type/subject and alphabetized by author, one step short of enforcing the Dewey Decimal System.

If he’s not careful, I’ll beat him to it this year, and rearrange them in a more meaningful manner: Read, Unread, and Not The Type You Read Straight Through. Maybe even make it complicated: He Read, She Read, They Didn’t Read Yet, and Reference.

The house is cool and dark. From the porch it looks deserted, the family inside having gone out to celebrate Boxing day or such. In truth, it is deserted, for I am far away along the Martian canals (having switched books), my feet swishing through their dead skin like dried leaves, wondering about the conflicts of Earth, so far away.