April 27, 2011

100 Books to Read Before you Die


So I was reading through some blogs a few days ago and I saw mention of "100 books to read before you die" over on Sew I Thought. I instantly started googling to try and find this list (thinking there was some sort of master list somewhere) because I lovee a good challenge and this totally fit the bill. I looked through about 15 lists before I realized none were exactly the same but all had most of the same titles. I chose to use this list from Black Espresso. To kick things off, I went through the list and took note of the titles I've already read. You should all jump in on this with me, I think it could be a lot of fun!!



1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (read it in high school...hated it)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (I've read five of them)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I've read parts of it)
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
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
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 (hated it!)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (also read in high school)
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 (GREAT BOOK!!)
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 – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (also a fabulous book)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (Hauntingly brilliant)
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 Inferno – Dante
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 (read it a few times as a kid)
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


I really haven't read many of these, and there are a few that really don't interest me. But I think that I'd be willing to put my feelings aside and read them all (or at least try!) regardless of how I feel about them.

xoxo
Mal

10 notes:

Brock

1,2,3,4,5,8,16,18,22,25,28,33,36,40,42,61,87,89.
That's 18 to your 11. Thus I'm better read. :)

Unknown

2,3,4,5,6,7,11,14,18,21,22,29,32,33,36,41,42,46,49,54,58,60,64,68,70,72,79,83,87,88,89,97,98,99
That's 34.... Is it weird that I read most of these before I reached high school? lol

Malori

@ Brock, I'm so conflicted because I'm excited you commented on this but you're being a brat so I'm grumpy... Hmm...

@ adpratt, that's impressive!!! You must have had great parents or perhaps you're just a fan of the classics? Either way, congrats!

Sarah

I've read numbers:3,5,8,12,18,22,28,36,41,44,46,61,62,66,67,73,81,83,85,87,92,95,98,99

But I've started but not finished numbers: 1,2,11,16,21,27,31,43,60,70,75,91

Just being honest here.

Malori

@ Sarah-- I love how many you've started but not finished haha. That sounds like me. I really want to like the classics but sometimes it's just not worth the read.

Unknown

Not you, but whoever wrote the list, they listed "The Complete Works of Shakespeare" but they also listed "Hamlet" on its own...and the also listed "The Chronicles of Narnia" as well as "The Lion, the Witch,and the Wardrobe" on its own..

I've read 2, 5, 7,8,16,18,22,28,29,33,36,37,40,41,
46,49,58,59,61,64,70,71,73,77,80,81,87,89,91,94, 98,99
Definitely read #77 Swallows and Amazons, a really fun adventure read. One of my favorite books as a kid.

Anonymous

There is only 99 books here am i the only one who noticed that number 26 is missing?

Malori

Oh my goodness I didn't notice that at all. haha good eye!

Unknown

1-5,9,11,21,22,29,32,36,38,42,44,46,54,58,59,64-66,73,76,81,91,92,98

Unknown

1, 2, 3, 5, 7-13, 16, 18, 21-24, 27-30, 32, 38, 39, 41-43, 45, 48, 49, 51, 54, 56, 57, 61, 65, 70-73, 76, 80, 81, 83, 89, 91, 97,100. I will suggest number 26 for you. How about something by Jack London like White Fang or Call of the Wild? These both are at the top of my list of favorite reads
Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe is also really good
Alexander Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo or The There Musketeers
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee

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