The Telegraph reports on a poll in Britain in which people were asked to name ten books they couldn’t live without and the top contenders are on this list. Ever since Cindy posted her list (others have also but I’m too lazy to track them down), I’ve thought it would be fun to be a copycat. It’s just for fun, Okay?
So here’s my list: ones I’ve read are bold, ones I’d like to read are italic, ones I’m ?clueless? about ??
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – I read the first two books, to only Harry is in bold
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – it’s time to re-read this one (updated 2010: I did!)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8= Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
8= 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’m trying to read four a year, I’ve probably read 1/4
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 I really liked the Brothers Karamozov, C & P is on my shelf
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 I’m not sure if I want to (2010 update: on my shelf)
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 ??? (2010: on my shelf)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel ???
52 Dune – Frank Herbert ???
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ??? (2010: on my wish list)
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth I almost bought this book based on a recommendation, but it’s over 1,000 pages. Yikes!
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 I hate to admit this, but I read this in a Reader’s Digest Abridgment, in a doctor’s office or something like that
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 ??? (2010: on my shelf)
75 Ulysses – James Joyce you’ve got to be kidding, right, THIS book is on this list?
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath ? one ? means I’ve heard of it, but…barely
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome on my bookshelf, does that count?
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray I’ve never read Thackeray; really would like to (2010 update: read it!)
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 Oh! She is my friend’s favorite children’s author! Very Hard to find in the US, very Dear in the British sense of the word
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery This was the best part of French 3 in high school
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 ??? (2010: I watched the movie, does that count? grins)
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Do you have any knowledge about books with ??? Either “definitely don’t waste your time” or “I can’t believe you haven’t heard of ___; it’s marvelous.”
We could make a list, couldn’t we precious, of all the wonderful books that are not on this list.
A Living Pencil 
I read Crime and Punishment about 2 years ago. Very highly recommended! The imagry in the book can suck you in though so beware…….
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath is also very good. I don’t recommend reading the above and this in succession though……read something happy in between!
oh, and Ulysses is very good if you know French. I don’t and wadding through it was what I imagine walking through quagmire would be like. I need to buy some of these books, trying to read them in the time alloted by the library just doesn’t work sometimes.
How strange. Thirty minutes after I posted this, I’m reading an interview with Susan Wise Bauer (The Well Trained Mind) on mindywithrow.com. Guess what she (SWB) says? That Ian McEwan is one of her favorite authors. And A.S. Byatt. So switch those from ??? to italics. Because one of the *other* authors on her list is P.D. James. It’s all about associations. Thanks, Kcaarin, for your feedback. Our reading lists continue to grow don’t they?
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins ….I just had to say I really enjoyed this one! I just read it. It’s an easy read and a bit predictable but otherwise good. (I may have put that on my site already…..sorry if I’m repeating myself, pregnancy brain!)
Watership Down – Richard Adams I read this in HS and loved it!
Dune – Frank Herbert ??? Sci Fi. Good book but they also have some really good movie renditions that would save you the time of investing into the book. There is alot of philosophy that is WAY off.
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley Excellent book!! I read this also this past year. Some disturbing imagry but very thought provoking esp when read alongside 1984. If you get a chance watch ‘Brazil’ by Terry Gilliam (get the 4 disk set if you can to watch the longer version)
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams This is a great book for a laugh
Ok, I’m really done now LOL!
What a tragedy! No Dorthy Sayers Lord Peter Wimsey on the list. I have been reading the LPW series and they are like a mix of Sherlock Holmes and a comedy. So sad that a lot of people have not even heard of them.
Well, I must say I am extremely surprised that I had read as many of the books on your list as I had. I thought your list would be WAY above my mortal sensibilities!!! 🙂 Watership Down was one of Butch’s all-time favorites, but I never read it. I tried to read Catch 22 a few years ago for school, hated it and put it down. Also hated Catcher in the Rye, but read it along w/ my high schooler-aged daughters – WAY TOO MUCH smart alecky “teenage angst” in my opinion. Now you really should read Da Vinci Code, as long as you read it as a VERY TALL TALE and nothing more. It helps to make more sense of the movie w/ Tom Hanks, which I felt rather butchered the book. The guy has a great imagination! I keep trying to get myself to read Anna Karenina, but it’s rather daunting, just in the number of pages, I think….
I read Cold Comfort Farm last year. It was fun. Sherry
I’ve read The Time Traveler’s Wife. It requires a bit of brain warping….but I actually enjoyed it.
The Time Traveller’s Wife was very good – but some steamy sections that deserve skipping.
Notes From Small Island is Bryson’s travelogue on his last tour through Britain before moving back to the States. Hilarious and very worth reading.
Hey thanks, everyone, for your feedback. I appreciate it. I’m going to check what my library has first. I just borrowed two books from a friend last night. The stacks are getting to the toppling stage!
I read The Life of Pi and A Fine Balance in the last couple of years.Loved them both. They are very different. A Fine Balance is probably the most heart-rending book I’ve read. Hard to read. Worth it.
Although they are italicized, I have read Lord of the Flies, and Of Mice and Men. Both required my one year of public high school. Lord of the Flies gave me nightmares. Granted, I was only in the 9th grade, however, it is definitely evidence of the carnality of the unsaved man. And as for Of Mice and Men, well, I just don’t care for Steinbeck in general, I think! But I love many of the other books on the list. You have just already read most of my favorites!