Fri 2 Mar 2007
So let’s see: I marked the ones I have read in bold. The ones I might like to read in italics. The ones I wouldn’t be caught dead reading as NP. The ones I have never heard of with a ?. It is true I have never heard of a good many of the books listed. The DHM beat me hands down by well in the teens, but to my credit I have read more Russian novels than she has. 2 of the books I plan to read rather soon: Crime and Punishment and The Three Musketeers. Dewey’s Tree House is also participating, I am neck in neck with her and I am mad at her for saying that I skewered people in my story, which is almost as bad as being called acerbic. Valerie, this is why I try to avoid being humorous 
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 This deserves every award it gets. It is a book not a movie. Please read the book before you see the movie. The movie is a great movie but it is not the book.
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 =Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell Only vague memories.
8= His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (?)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott Probably 5 or 6 times.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (NP)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 20 down, 10 to go.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (?)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (NP)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (NP)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell About 40 times in Jr High and highschool.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Perhaps my favorite Dickens and the new BBC series is wonderful. Perhaps the best casting ever. Dicken’s makes casting easy, I think.
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 Public Highschool
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
Lost count
34 Emma - Jane Austen
My favorite 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 (NP)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
(Well, I tried.)
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 Madding…Madding..
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (NP)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (?)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons ( I saw the movie
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 (NP)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck I went to public highschool.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (NP)
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 (NP)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (NP)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (NP)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Probably Not) Just don’t have the heart.
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 (NP)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (NP)
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 (Not sure)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( Not sure if I finished this one, but I did finish the movie.)
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 (NP)
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
I get 2 credits for this one?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (NP)
I don’t do Dahl!!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (At least some of it.)
23 Comments
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Aw, c’mon Cindy. Actually I’d be honoured if you
Let’s see…”there was this Canadian blog called The Beaver Dam where they sat around chewing up forest timber and an occasional committee-written textbook”…but how that fits into your muck-raking blogger/fuzzy slipper story, I’m not sure. 
skewerednicely poked fun at me like that.Comment by Mama Squirrel (March 2, 2007 @ 9:12 pm )
I saw this meme over at Ian’s blog and wanted to do it. Can’t post to my blog for a while, though, so don’t know if I’ll get to it. A Suitable Boy is a big, thick Indian novel in the same vein as Trollope - but set in India. I loved it.
Comment by Laura D. (March 2, 2007 @ 11:18 pm )
Wow.
You’ve read a few that I’ve missed and I’ve read a few that you’ve missed. However, I think you may have beaten me by just a few. I agree with you on Dahl!
You can skewer me if you want. I’m kinda hyper and yet still strangely boring. :p
Comment by Birdie (March 3, 2007 @ 3:04 am )
I’ve no blog, so I’ll just print this out and my husband and I will have fun discussing it.
I honestly think that some people maybe have just put whatever bestseller they read recently on the list (some of those farther down). They’re probably decent books, but would they really come before, say, *Brothers K*? It’s probably worth reading a few of them just to find out whether they might be potential classics, though. Someone recently gave me *Curious Incident,* so I might read that.
I see you have a (?) by Philip Pullman. Pullman would like to fashion himself as the anti-C.S. Lewis, so far as I can tell. Pull up reviews on Amazon or Google to confirm.
Did you deliberately boldtype only *One* in *One Hundred Years of Solitude*? If so, that’s funny! I confess, however, that I’ve never read it.
Comment by Laura A (March 3, 2007 @ 8:57 am )
Yes, Laura, I did that delibrately but I was copying the DHM who did something like that on one of her books.
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 9:30 am )
Birdie, I have never met anyone who agrees with me about Dahl. Welcome to the little club
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 9:31 am )
Don’t worry, Mama Squirrel, I have edited chapter 3 to include you
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 9:36 am )
Where did you get this booklist? I’ve read about 36 of them and have another 14 of them sitting on the bookshelf waiting for me. Many of them I read in my teen years, so I’ve forgotten much of what they are about.
Fun!
Jean
Comment by Jean in Wisconsin (March 3, 2007 @ 11:01 am )
This will bug me all day, Cindy. Does NP stand for not possible; not planning; never, please!; nein, patoooi - I have to know.
Comment by Carol in Oregon (March 3, 2007 @ 11:17 am )
Twenty four, for me.
Just last year…
Anna.
The Count.
Crime and Punishment.
I am a late bloomer
Comment by Miz Booshay (March 3, 2007 @ 1:42 pm )
I thought NP might stand for NO Point in reading it.
Cindy, What’s your objection to Dahl? Didn’t you have to read Charlie and the Chocolate factory or James and the Giant Peach in public school?
Comment by Jo (March 3, 2007 @ 2:04 pm )
Awww, Cindy - you’re killing me! I have a life to lead, real off-computer stuff, and I keep checking in for an answer. Did Jo get it?
Comment by Carol in Oregon (March 3, 2007 @ 3:20 pm )
Y’all are gonna kill me. I forget what it means. I think I was thinking No Plan to read but that doesn’t sound quite like it and I can’t remember. I am on my way out to walk. I will try to find my brain out there.
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 3:34 pm )
Really curious about your reasoning behing marking Tess of the D’Urbervilles with a NP. I read it in college, thought it was really good. But I would like to be ‘educated’ by your opinion. Not being smart or anything, I really want to know! Just like I used to think Harry Potter was OK, until I read a few people’s opinions that turned my mind around. Just interested as to what you’ve heard about it. Thanks so much!
Comment by Monique (March 3, 2007 @ 4:08 pm )
CIN-DEEEEEE!! What do you mean, “I *forget* what it means”????????? The stress!! I hope your walk and ‘the clean sea breeze of the centuries’ clears your mind. I will cope.
Comment by Carol in Oregon (March 3, 2007 @ 4:09 pm )
Monique,
I like Thomas Hardy in some senses but I have always had a vague feeling that Tess was gratuitous and I try to avoid books that might glorify sin. On the other hand I read Anna Karenina because it was written perfectly to illustrate sin without glorifying it. But I may be wrong about Tess. I just have a vague feeling.
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 4:48 pm )
I think any one of the Russians you’ve read counts as at least two dozen of the other less worthys I have read.
Remember, it was only in my mid thirties that I began reading books I couldn’t finish in a single sitting (a single sitting being usually two hours, sometimes four hours or less).
About Dahl, I generally agree. In fact there are only two of his books I don’t think are totally creepy and meanspirited. Charlie is one of them. The other is something like Danny, The Champion of the World, and it has a very sweet father-son relationship. the father, however, is a poacher with no intentions of quitting.
Gone with the Wind forty times? Whoa.
Comment by deputyheadmistress (March 3, 2007 @ 5:28 pm )
Maybe NP stands for a complicated latin phrase.
I wouldn’t know.
Comment by Janet (March 3, 2007 @ 6:23 pm )
Non Pareil? Maybe?
Comment by Cindy (March 3, 2007 @ 7:29 pm )
I am not crazy about Roald Dahl in general, but I do like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
Comment by Eva in AZ (March 3, 2007 @ 10:49 pm )
I, too, want to know what your objection to Dahl is! I loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory as well as the Glass Elevator as a child of eight. I also thought James and the Giant Peach was a sort of precursor to the likes of Lemony Snickett. But I haven’t read them since I was about eight or nine. I was thinking of reading them to my son soon….
Comment by Brandy (March 4, 2007 @ 12:43 pm )
I have been out of town but I will take a moment to explain why I don’t like Dahl. It is completely inconsistent and if I applied this criteria to all authors I wouldn’t be reading anything at all. I used to read biographies non-stop. For some reason I cannot even fathom now, about 20 years ago, I read a bio of Patricia Neal, the actress who was married to Dahl for a while. Her description of his character and their marriage left me cold and I could never bring myself to read his books after that. I had missed reading them in my own childhood , I had never seen the movies and I think at about the same time I read about his married life he also came out with one of his seedier books. So I rejected Dahl and never looked back. Plenty of books to read anyway.
Now, I have probably ruined a perfectly good author for everyone!
Comment by Cindy (March 6, 2007 @ 8:25 am )
LOL. I understand completely. Thank you!
Comment by Jo (March 6, 2007 @ 9:28 am )