100 Books Meme

This one is a list of books. My star-rated favourites are in red, ones I have read in bold, un-read plain and plan-to-reads in italic.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen-I have read most of her works. The social strata and rules are complex and foreign but a love story is a love story and the bad guys get comeuppance. What's not to like?
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I have read nearly everything JRRT has written. I find his worlds intricate, complex and thorough, as well as just damn entertaining.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte. Broody hero who plays mind games, but she still loves the guy.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling-see previous posts. Again- great world, great characters, rollicking storylines.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee. Didn't really like it.
6 The Bible - I’ve read most of it. The summer I was thirteen, I decided to read it, unguided. I have gone back and read parts of it again. I think a study group might be nice to do someday.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte. I didn't like Heathcliffe and Cathy was a wimp. Her sister was the better author.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell. I read and re-read this in my teens and found it chilling.
9 His Dark Materials-on my to-read list
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens. Not my favourite Dickens book.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott. Every little girl born in the US in this century has read this. And cried over Beth. I liked Little Men better, though, and Rose in Bloom better still.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy. Still better than the movie.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller. Read this in my twenties, but it didn't make a huge impression on me.
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I’ve read many of his works , including the sonnets; my mom had a complete works volume in tiny print. Can't claim to have read all, though.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier. I liked this one when in my teens.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien. See above.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks. Never heard of it.
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger. Amusing, but not on my list of greats.
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger. Nope.
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell. Very good book. You can get lost in the drama. Scarlett was a total uneducated bitch, though- what a waste.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald. It was interesting.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens. On the list- one of the few Dickens books I haven't gotten to.
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy. On the list- one of these days when I have time.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - laughed my fanny off over this series. Gotta love sci-fi!
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh. Nope.
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Nope
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck. Yup. Sad.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll. Yup. He had to have been on acid.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame. Weird. And I usually like fantasy, but these talking rodents didn't do it for me. Brits can be very weird.
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy. Nope
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens. Good one, but Dora was a wuss.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis. Loved them.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Hello? this is on twice?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini. Just heard of it.
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - liked it and enjoyed the movie too.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne. This kind of crap makes me want to vomit.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery. Loved everything she wrote.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - Atwood is a genius.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan. Not yet.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel. Not yet
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - read most of the Dune books but they just won't stop- now his son writes them. Enough already!
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons. Never heard of it.
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.Never heard of it.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon.Never heard of it.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens. A favourite- "tis a far far better thing I do..."
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon. Very interesting- I loved his perspective.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Not yet.
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck. Sad.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Gripping.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt. Never heard of it.
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - Nope.
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy. Had to read in college. Blocked it out.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick-Herman Melville. Not yet, but a friend's husband write his dissertation on Melville.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens. Yup.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker. Yup. One summer I read a lot of horror. HG Lovecraft was my favourite. I swore I could hear scratching in the walls...
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yup.
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson. Never heard of it.
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - If I had a nickel for every time I picked this one up and tried to get through it… I did read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and was equally confused.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - Chilling. Loved it.
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome. Never heard of it.
78 Germinal - Emile Zola. Nope.
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray. Nope.
80 Possession - AS Byatt. Never heard of it.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens. Loved it.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker. Great story.
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - nope.
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert. nope.
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry. Never heard of it.
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White. Eh. Talking bugs and pigs.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom. I don't think so.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyle. yup.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection. Never heard of it.
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad. No but I adore "Light in the Forest".
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery. Wrote a paper on it in French class.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks. Never heard of it.
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams. Yup.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole. Never heard of it.
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas.nope.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare. Yup. "What a piece of work is m an, how noble in reason..."
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl. Yup
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo. It was a tough read, but I did it.

So- I read 56 of 100. However- two were counted twice- once as a series, once as a book. A big sprinkling of children's books- 13 (although the HP series is listed as one) entries.

I collect children's books, and I surely don't consider Pooh to be a must-read.

I do not fear to say I never heard of a book on the list. What standards were used to compile it? Are they books every educated person should have read? Books that most Americans most likely would have read? Am I a moron because I haven't gotten around to Salman Rushdie? I've read a number of other Nobel prizewinners, some of whom most Americans wouldn't recognize.

Maybe I need to make my own top 100 list.