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 ??
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 – 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 