Follow the leaders
Following the leads of Kestrel, Two-and-a-half Orcs, and JustOneAnna, here is my progress on the National Education Association’s list of Top 100 books. (Why can’t I find a link for this list??) As has been the case with the meme, I’ve bolded things I’ve read. However, my list offers a twist. Green underlining means it’s an all-time favorite; red means that I hated it. I put asterisks in front of my top, top favorite books on this list.
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 — wait a minute, that’s 6 books! (I’ve read 3)
***5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 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 – ok wait, that’s a TON of books!! I should get credit for reading most of 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
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
***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
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
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 — wait, isn’t that included in #14??
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
51/100. Goodness I’ve read a lot of these! To be honest, I will never read some of the other ones. (The Five People You Meet In Heaven? Mmmyeah… no.)
August 25, 2008 at 5:14 pm
Harry Potter has 7 books… with the first 6 being great and the 7th having a crap storyline imo.
August 25, 2008 at 6:04 pm
I read only one book from your list, #42.
I feel so proud of myself right now…
August 25, 2008 at 10:11 pm
I keep chasing this thing… the reason you can’t find a link is because the purported source is incorrect. Here, let me copy most of my comment on Kestrel’s article:
It’s not one of the National Education Association’s lists – http://www.nea.org/readacross/resources/booklists.html . Nor is it the NEA – National Endowment of the Arts – list ( http://www.neabigread.org/index.php ). It’s remarkably close – though still not quite the same – as the BBC’s “Big Read” list ( http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml ) from 2003. But really, somewhere along the chain of dropped links, someone kludged their own list and falsely attributed it. I can’t find the origin – too many dead trails – but that’s the way the thing runs.
August 25, 2008 at 11:08 pm
I am so glad I found someone else who hates Gatsby as much as me!!!
August 26, 2008 at 3:51 am
The Great Gatsby was horrible ickiness … I don’t like Steinbeck either but forced my way through a couple of his …. and you didn’t like Les Miserables? I loved it-but then, I did read the condensed version (though I didn’t know it was the condensed at the time).
September 3, 2008 at 11:20 pm
[...] 100 Books list (BBC) Posted on September 4, 2008 by Nim I saw this over on the Game Dame’s blog, and thought I’d put it here for my own posterity. And posterior if I sat down and read these [...]