Came across this through Jamie’s blog. Apparently a US organisation has come up with a list of that nation’s top 100 books, although it estimates that on average most adults have only read 6 on the list. I find that last bit unlikely - there are loads of children’s classics there too, so a child could easily log up 6 through their school years. Anyway, I’ve highlighted in bold the ones I’ve read (or read part of in a few cases - I’m a big cheater!). I’ve also got a few of these books but never read them (I’ve highlighted them in italics) - and now feel inspired to get on with it. How about you? And do you think there are any glaring omissions from the list?
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (note - 3 big fat books!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (note 7 big fat books!) - of which actually I’ve only read the first
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - but actually can’t remember if I finished…
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 - I’ve not read all, just some
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
8 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 (and it’s sequel)
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 (all 5 books in the series)
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
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - but I know I’ve still to finish 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
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (read all of the Dune books …)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - I’m sure I’ve got this somewhere, I’ve meant to read it for a long time
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 - only got as far as buying it and admiring the cover
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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - I have a beautiful illustrated version, which I admit I bought for the pictures (well, I was studying illustration at the time, it was a valid thing to do…)
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 - looks good on the bookshelf, but dauntingly huge
8 comments
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July 16, 2008 at 8:49 pm
brunettekoala
Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth isn’t on there??
July 16, 2008 at 8:52 pm
brunettekoala
Or ‘Treasure Island’ by Robert Louis Stevenson? i’m surprised ‘Chocolat’ by Joanne Harris isn’t in there too.
July 17, 2008 at 3:24 pm
bringonthejoy
Well, Shakespeare’s complete works is mentioned separately to Hamlet, which is a bit confusing. Good call with Treasure Island and Chocolat! I wonder what influence the origin of the list has had on it’s contents?
July 20, 2008 at 6:17 pm
Lincoln
It’s surprisingly recent or populist.
Some choices are bizarre. Where are Kafka, Camus, Dostoyevsky (apart from C&P), Solzenitzen, Dante?
I guess it’s called “favourite” so they aren’t deciding on quality, import or merit.
July 21, 2008 at 9:28 am
bringonthejoy
You’re right Lincoln. There are some great books there though, but it’s a ‘most popular’ list rather than an all-time greats list. But popularity and quality aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, either! It would be interesting to see a list of the world’s most influential/most important books. What do you think should be in it?
July 21, 2008 at 9:39 am
bringonthejoy
Following some investigation, I believe the origins of this list are slightly swathed in mystery. I couldn’t find the list on the website of the organisation it was supposed to have originated from. More research required!…. I’ll keep you posted.
July 21, 2008 at 7:42 pm
brunettekoala
Even then, not sure this is necessarily the ‘most popular’ list either. Doesn’t accurately reflect any list of bestselling books I’ve ever seen…
Mysterious indeed!
July 22, 2008 at 9:22 am
bringonthejoy
I don’t imagine it’s ‘most popular’ in terms of book sales at any one time, & more to do with favourite books over people’s lifetimes. I would really struggle to produce a personal 100 favourite books, particularly if I had to put them in any kind of order!