It all began when I saw edog's list. I'm a tad competitive about some things (understatement) so I had to check and see how I measured up. I copied the list into Excel and bolded the ones I'd read and added them up, but then I noticed that the last one was numbered 100 in text but was on the 98th line. Upon further investigation, I discovered that #44 and #51 were missing entirely so I tried edog's code thinking maybe the printed version had swallowed something but no. I went to The Big Read website sure they'd have the original list but found nothing even remotedly like this. (They've got their books for this summer's recommendations and all kinds of intellectualizing gobbledeegook about Americans and reading but no 100s.) I tried all manner of internet searches and found all manner of lists of books but none were these. Finally I returned to edog and saw he said he'd gotten the list from "Sheila" so after a bit of sleuthing on his site I found her link (Sherri Blossoms) but her list was missing 44 and 51, too. So I clicked her from whence (Moonrat) but again they were missing. I kept going back and back and back . . . six times in all until eventually I got to halo4's list which, blessedly, included the two books (wonder what happened? was it a simple case of Blogsphere Telephone?). In the end, here we are. See rules at the end of the post.

THE LIST - of which waaayyyyy too many are collections, children's and/or school books and/or science fiction. Since this list is unobtainable except via other blogs, I do not know but am curious as to who compiled it and with what criteria in mind. It seems like a mix of "important" books and best sellers and "pc" and "favorites" from its compiler(s). Meme and list writers should include their source. Anyway, be that as it may . . . .

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 (I read one so I get 1/6 of a point)
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 (I gave myself 1/2 a point)
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
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 (hated it as a kid, like it now)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (didn't understand it at 15, love it now)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 **Persuasion - Jane Austen (Anne Elliott is one of my favorite people in the world)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (started it, didn't like it)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (started it, didn't like it)
40 *Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (marvelous idea but not crazy about the book)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (a good friend adores this)
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 (does watching the movie count?)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (hated the movie, sorry)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (no way)
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 (Dirk Bogarde made it come alive)
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 (you must be kidding)
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (that's SIR Rushdie to you)
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 (marvelous)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (MUST read this)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (loathed it, have major issues with her)
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 (never even heard of this)
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 (another collection; sheesh)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (ugh; cute until you're 11)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (I hate anthropomorphizing)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (I've read others of his though)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 *Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (love lots of his stories)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (hated the musical too; so sue me)

So bottom line is I've read lots of them (72-4 depending on how you count) although I feel I should have read them all but I guess no one can be expected to have read every book in the world. Plus, the older I get the more readily I put aside a book that I don't like after 50 or 100 pages.

THE RULES : such as they are:
   (1) bold titles you've read,
   (2) italicize those you intend to read,
   (3)(a) underline those you liked
* (3)(b) tag those you adore with an asterisk, and
   (4) strike out those you didn't like.

Labels: about me, blogs (others'), books, writing