Read Anything Good Lately?

(Thanks so much to Karmyn for this concept.)

I've actually read a lot of these (36% of 'em, actually!) - I love a good book. I end-up buying myself a copy of a lot of these along the way. There's something about owning an actual copy of a good book, so that you can go back to it again and again. I remember about seven years ago (well before the movies were out etc etc) re-reading "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy SIX times in a row (yes, six!), simply because it was that good!

Going thru this list actually made me realise - and this came as quite a shock - that I have never actually completed any of Dicken's novels - YET! Forgive me! lol.

Oi! Where's Yann Martel's "Life of Pi" on this list? Oh, Lists are always great for getting people thinking and starting arguments, huh? heh heh.

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Endowment for the Arts has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How do you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Simply - a masterpiece of creative fiction... no wonder it took him 13 years to write... all those re-writes! Gagh!)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I know they're good, but for some reason I've never actually picked one up to read... I know that I won't be able to read just one, but will have to get the lot and read 'em all at once! Gagh! hahahaa.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird- Harper Lee
6 The Bible (yes, I've read all of it... the joys of being an ex-missionary, you know! lol. There's a lot of blood, gore, sex and incest in those pages, you know!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eight Four - George Orwell (Winston Smith, I salute you, sir! The bastards got you tho... but they were always going too... such a scary indictment on our western society STILL!!!)
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 (Surprise surprise! Imagine me enjoying a book celebrating total randonmess!)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I always seem to come back to Shakespeare eventually. Love him or loathe him, you can't help but read him.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I read 'LOTR' before I read this, and the simplicity of the tale [and the beauty of the telling] floored me - in a positive way!)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Holden Caufield is a wonderment of creative fiction).
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 (I was a hoopy frood way back in the 80's! I have all five books of the Trilogy, you know... lol. Adams was no-doubt a fractured genius).
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (The beauty of the created characters' voice is simply... [kisses the air]. And the ending...!!! Stark realism!!! Gorgeous!).
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (and her counterpart, Through the Looking Glass)
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 (This analogy that stands the test of time... spine-chillingly accurate).
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 (Another analogy about the darkness of the human psyche, brilliantly developed).
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
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
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 - (despite being really bleak [definitely not something to read for a 'bit of lighthearted fun', that's for sure!!!], I adore the atmosphere he's created here!!!)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Call me Ishmail! lol)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (Yes, Joyce is not an 'easy' read, but mentally rewarding. His word play is... [kisses the air!] )
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 (Salutations!)
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 (A great book, and only a short story, really. Great mood created mirroring the dark recesses of the human psyche).
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 (Oh YAY! I've loved [and now own] all of Neville Shute's books since I was a teenager!)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Peas be with ewe
Cyalayta,
Mal :)

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