Ramona posted this after seeing it on Purplesque’s blog.
I feel compelled to do this now. So here goes….
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (I’ve read an abdridged version & I’ve seen the film).
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I’ve read an abdridged version).
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I’ve read an abdridged version).
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 The Complete works of Shakespeare (I’ve read The Merchant of Venice, Julius Caesar, Much Ado About Nothing, King Lear)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife
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 (I’ve read an abdridged version).
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 (I don’t think I completed this one)
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 (Started reading & did not complete it)
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 (I’ve read an abdridged version).
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 (I’ve read an abdridged version).
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 (Did not complete it)
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
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 Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (One of the first complete collections that I read).
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. 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
I would suggest - in no particular order other than the first two, which I think are mandatory:
- The collected works of P. G. Wodehouse.
- The entire Discworld collection by Terry Pratchett.
- A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson.
- Made in America by Bill Bryson.
- The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
- All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
- The Collected Short Stories of Saki.
- Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan.
- The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes by Jamyang Norbu.
- The Godfather by Mario Puzo.
More books to add to my list to read.
Notes-
- Your list is better than the preceding one.
- The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes? Really?
- Where did you get all those abridged versions?
I wanted to, but did not add, some of the classic works by Asimov and Clark because there were no sci-fi books in the original hundred. A sad omission!!
Purplesque in my boarding school’s library
A few of them may have been illustrated versions.
I remember a few more classics like Lord of the Flies, that I read in abridged form.
Wonder why none of Mark Twain’s books are there? And Pearl Buck’s Good Earth?
And;
-
Moby Dick by Herman MelvilleRedacted after reading Pk’s comment.- The Pillars Of The Earth by Ken Follett.
- The Name of the Rose by Umerto Eco.
Yeah..this list is random at best. What about GB Shaw? And Wilde? Norman ForGodsSake Mailer?
Moby Dick? I shudder to think of legions of young readers who picked up Moby Dick, read through the first ten pages, put it down, and went back to their GameBoys never to return again.
Did this on my blog. But I’m retarded about the underlining thing. Blogger doesn’t give that option….
It did seem like a really random list of books…
I couldn’t resist either. I added this to my reading blog (link above).
Ugh. Moby Dick. We have a reading tv book club in Australia and they raved about it. People seem to love it. I really wanted to, but really didn’t. Luckily, there is not as much pressure to read it in Aus - it is the “great American novel” after all.
Scanman, I can’t believe that a school would stock so many abridged classics. Although, if you have read the fabulous “Mister Pip”, which was Booker shortlisted last year, you will get an explanation of the value of good abridgements. Although I suppose that is a minor spoiler. Sorry.
Cris
You haven’t finished the Count of Monte Cristo?!?! Gasp! You must finish it! It’s my favorite book ever!
Also, I love P.G. Wodehouse. He’s amazing. One of my favorite authors. His Jeeves books are all hilarious!
And one more thing I’ve noticed about this list. Doesn’t number 14 kind of cover number 98? Seriously, I mean, if you’re going to ask about “every shakespeare book” and then about “hamlet”. . . I mean, isn’t it slightly redundant?
Anyway. . . I’ve read plenty of these. Not all of them. But probably a good 10%. It makes for a good list of books I need to read!
And you have to read the Lord of the Flies. It’s a high school level book that takes not alot of time to read. I finished it in one afternoon. It’s very intense, and way creeepy.
You need to read Charlotte’s Web to your daughter. While it is a children’s book, it is a classic! Reading it to her would give you an excuse to read it ;o)
You asked why Moby Dick wasn’t on there …but it is ..and you highlighted it ;o)
I agree with everyone who said this list is random. Most of the top lists are random, for that matter.
DrCris My boarding school had a huge collection of abridged classics and I read a large number of them. I usually avoid all books that are short-listed for prizes. I find that I don’t understand most of them. I read about thirty pages of Arundhati Roy’s God of Small Things and gave up. Thankfully, I didn’t waste money on that book. It was a gift (from someone who obviously did not know my taste).
Thanks for pointing out the error Pk. A stupid mistake for a radiologist. Missing a ‘lesion’ as big as a whale! I’m ashamed
I am a physician now practising in the US and trained at a very good med school in India ie I am not stupid. But what is with all this West Worship. Could you not find some worthy books to read by Indian authors? Charlotte’s Web indeed!
Idia will go to hell - superpower or no - unless everyone sheds this slavish colonial mentality.
Kali: Who said anything about this being ‘West Worship.’ It’s just a blog meme with a random list of books, albeit with a pronounced western slant because it originated in the west.
If you took a few minutes to explore my blog you would understand how wrong you are when you accuse me of ‘west worship.’ That is ignorant and rude.
Get off your high horse and come to India to practice medicine if you love the motherland so much and don’t want it going to hell.
PS. FYI I haven’t read Charlotte’s Web, and I don’t intend to. The least you could have done is check my read & suggested reading list at the end of the post. Please see # 8 & 9.