19. Time Traveler's Wife

My book club read this in March.  Great book!  

95. The Confederacy of Dunces

I finished this last night; it took me forever to read!  The protagonist had absolutely no redeeming qualities!  I really liked Burma Jones and also Detective Mancuso.  The second half of the book moved along better than the first half and I liked that the author pulled all of the characters together at the end.

68. Bridget Jones Diary

This was a cute book and an easy read.  And it makes me glad that I missed the whole "single in my 30's" craziness.

Here is a list put forth by the National Endowment for the Arts in the U.S.  It lists the top 1oo books and asks how many you've actually read.  The Big Read (which is an initiative of the NEA designed to restore reading to the center of American culture) estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the books on this list.Here’s how it works:

1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
   
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
   
3. Reprint this list on your blog and link back to this post.

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  (LOVE them!)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible (it’s a work in progress, but I’m going to bold it anyway!)

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
(I heart Little Women)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller


14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read a lot 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 Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (I’ll be reading this in March for my book club.)

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (maybe?)

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (saw the movie J)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald


23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (yeah, not happening.)

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 (Why is this on here if the Chronicles are also on here?)

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
(Better than the movie)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
 (I tried, Joelma, really, I tried.)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
(This book was fantastic…. Just get through the first 100 pages.  Very thought provoking)

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 (funny that this in on here…)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
(one of my favorites as a child)

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
(Love anything by 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 (I don’t even know what this IS.)

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
(Did I read this in college?  I think I did, but should it really count if I can’t remember?)

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 Miserables-Victor Hugo

 

That looks like 38 total.  Not so impressive. I read a LOT, but apparently I need to read BETTER! I love lists like this, because I love marking things off lists!  I’ve listed 15 books to try to read.  

Here is the challenge!  Pick three books that you haven’t read but think you should.  And let’s read them together.  Leave me a comment with the books you pick!