Another reading list
I’m not making much progress against either the Esquire 75 or Jezebel’s alternative 75 “must reads”1. That’s not to say that I haven’t been reading, or that I haven’t been enjoying what I’ve read, but my belief that I am a reasonably “well-read” person has taken a bit of a hit from these lists. That’s why I was pleased to see the Guardian’s Books you can’t live without: the top 100. It’s even got The Magic Faraway Tree on it!
This, therefore, is the list I’m going to try to crack (although… The Bible? Really? I’m going to make an exception for that. Oh, and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I mean, honestly.)
Anyway, the full list – with strikethroughs – after the jump.
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 have some of them, and I’ve read the first one… I guess that doesn’t count)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (Not a chance)
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 – William Shakespeare (Again, I have them…)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 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
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
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 (I don’t understand the duplication, here. Surely TLTW&TW is included in The Chronicles?)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernières
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 (Maybe after I finish the Bible…)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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
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 (Now I really wish I’d joined the Dracula group post Infinite Jest, instead of the Gravity’s Rainbow group. I’m not sure I can even find my copy of GR now…)
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
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 (I’ve read these, and the Narnia books, so many times – does that earn me a pass on Five People?
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery (I can’t believe I haven’t read this. This will be my first “achievement” – I think I’ll read it tomorrow. Edited 25/10 to add: read it on the number 70 tram out to Burwood yesterday afternoon and loved it.)
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 Misérables – Victor Hugo
The good news? I’ve read a lot of these already. The other good news? There is a bit of crossover to the other lists, so Middlemarch, Moby Dick, Ulysses, Cold Comfort Farm and a couple of others will make inroads in two places. The bad news? Well, I’m stating upfront that I’m not reading the Bible, but… I don’t think “reading the list” is a good enough incentive to get me to pick up The Da Vinci Code, The Lovely Bones or The Five People You Meet In Heaven. Seriously. Life’s too short.
As of today, then, I’ve read 62 of the 100. I’ll try to remember to check back…
25/10 – 63/100 The Little Prince
26/10 – 64/100 A Christmas Carol
7/11 – 65/100 Swallows and Amazons
= = = = = = = = =
1. In fact, in the past year I have only crossed one book off the Jez list and nothing from the Esquire list.
...blah blog blah... 
The Da Vinci Code! I tried to watch the film version last night and couldn’t even get to 9.30 until flicking over to check out one of the more crap Bond films on ch 7… Is it me or is there something wooden and dead about Tom Hanks? It isn’t botox it’s just dead on the inside… This is a great list. Any idea what you are going to start with after The Little Prince?
I’ve decided to try to read the ones that have been sitting on the bookshelf for years, so I’m tossing up between Middlemarch, A Christmas Carol (another one I can’t believe I haven’t read already!), Bleak House and The Wasp Factory. I think I’ll probably go with CC, but will probably grab a copy of Cold Comfort Farm at some point and slot that in there.
As for Tom Hanks, he earned such goodwill for me from Big that I was surprised at how much he lost with Forrest Gump and Castaway. In order to preserve my teenage memories, I now just avoid anything he’s in. It must be some sort of emotional botox. Now I’m going to have to go over to IMDb to see if there’s anything I’m forgetting…
I wonder if there is a way to un-read any of those books on the list. Lists are cool, lists are fun, but there’s just too many lists these days. You can’t walk into a bookshop these days without seeing some new book titled, “1,000 you must experience before you die”.
I’m over some smart alec list maker….who really should extend the range of their hobbies and interests…..telling me which 1,000 things to experience in their particular field.
1,000 list makers you should avoid. Now there’s an idea worth persuing.
I nearly passed out when I saw the slew of 1000 lists that appeared a couple of years ago. There have got to be some fairly arbitrary inclusions on a list of that many “must dos”.
Plus… Jazon Mraz alone is reason enough to avoid the words “1000” and “things” in proximity.
Which books on the list would you unread? And why? I wouldn’t mind having the time I spent with A Town Like Alice back. And I’m wondering if Robert Crumb’s Book of Genesis will earn me a Bible strikethrough…
Wiiilllsonnn!!! Now because of damn Castaway, and instead of reminiscing fondly about Big or Turner and Hooch I think of Wilson. A soccer ball with a blood face. Actually, we named the M’s placenta Wilson when I was pregnant. That was probably too much information. Anyway, good luck with the lists and it’s very impressive that you’ve read such a large chunk of this one already. You’re right. Reading The Bible would be going too far.
Hahaha! Turner and Hooch! I’d forgotten about that. I was, however, discussing another sad-eyed dog today: Woodrow, from Wonder World. Did he really fall out of a helicopter?
I’m reading the short books first, I’ve decided, so am looking out for a copy of Lolita…
I loved Lolita. It is so beautifully written and has this thick sadness to it… this does get a bit tragic toward the end but is well worth reading. Amazingly Nabokov wrote it in English then translated it into his native Russian. Also Martin Amis is a massive fan and anyone that is a friend of Amis’ is a friend of mine… by the way there is no Amis (snr or jnr) on the list!
I have lugged A Suitable Boy around for 20 years, and still have not read it.