Yesterday Jessica Faust of BookEnds posted about the Facebook Book List Challenge and a list of 100 great books which everyone should read but most people never do. (Yeah, that’s the short version. For her post, which explains it better, click through here.)
I’m not on Facebook (and don’t intend to be) but I like the idea of a challenge, and I particularly like Jessica’s idea of reading at least one book from the list each year until she’s finished them all. I like it so much that I’ve decided to totally copy her participate too. Feel free to hop in and do the same!
I’ve duplicated the list below. The ones in bold are the ones I’ve already read, and since I have The Count of Monte Cristo sitting on the nightstand (we won’t discuss how long it’s been there, or how many other books managed to pile themselves on top of it) I think I’ll start there.
If you’re participating, feel free to link or name your starter in the comments!
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series – J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the d’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – J. D. 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 Hitchhiker’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. The Chronicles of Narnia – C. S. Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe – C. S. Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – William Golden
40. Winnie-the-Pooh – A. A. 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 – L. M. 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 Martell
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 (And boy am I glad I don’t have to read it again.)
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson
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 – A. S. Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas – Charles 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 – E. B. 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 (Another one I’m glad not to have to repeat.)
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 (Odd, because like The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe this is actually covered elsewhere, but I guess that means I get credit twice.)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo