Monday, February 16, 2009

Classics for Me

It's about time I compiled a booklist for yours truly. I've been putting this off for too long. Thankfully, I happened to stop by at L's blog where this entry lists BBC's Big Read list of 100 favorite books in Britain. Now isn't that a swell place to start?

Just in case you're interested to return to this list often, I'll be linking it in the sidebar under Booklists.
  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (read)
  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (read)
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (read)
  4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (read and re-read: 2002-2008)
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (read)
  6. The Bible (partially read)
  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (read)
  8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (read)
  9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman(read)
  10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (read)
  11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (read)
  12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (read)
  13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (read)
  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (read: March 2009)
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
  18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
  19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
  20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (read)
  21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
  22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (read)
  23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (read)
  24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
  25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams(partially read, didn't enjoy it!)
  26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
  27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (read)
  29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (read: 2008)
  30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (listened to audiobook)
  31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
  32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (read)
  33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (read)
  34. Emma - Jane Austen (read)
  35. Persuasion - Jane Austen (read)
  36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (hmmm...shouldn't this be included under The Chronicles of Narnia? Anyway, read)
  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(read aloud to kiddo)
  41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (read)
  42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (read: 2008)
  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 (read)
  47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (read)
  48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
  49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (read)
  50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
  51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (read: Feb 2009)
  52. Dune - Frank Herbert
  53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
  54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (read)
  55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (read)
  56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (read)
  58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
  59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (read)
  60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (read)
  62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
  63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
  64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
  65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (read)
  66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
  67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (read)
  68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
  69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
  70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
  71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (read)
  72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
  73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (read)
  74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
  75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I don't think I'll ever be reading this)
  76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
  77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
  78. Germinal - Emile Zola
  79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (read)
  80. Possession - AS Byatt
  81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (read)
  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: 2007)
  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 (read and loved: 1980s)
  91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (read and disliked immensely)
  92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (read: Jan 2009)
  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 (read)
  97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
  98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (read)
  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (read: 2008)
  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I think I remember reading this in my teens)
Well, if I've counted correctly, I've read about 40 of these already. But most of them were too long ago. I'm just not the reader I used to be 15-20 years ago.

1 comment:

  1. Suji, You could (should actually!) read some of these with your son - multitasking at its best! My dd (8) is thoroughly enjoying a reread of Winnie the Pooh. This was probably last read aloud when she was 4 and she is getting so much more out of it now - including a new appreciation of why her nickname is Piglet. And Swallows and Amazons is a wonderful read aloud (althogh dd is currently reading it herself) if you like tales of kids enjoying the freedom of the outdoors coupled with healthy doses of imagination. I personally enjoyed (in a horrified kind of way) Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale - definitely not one to read aloud to a child though. I'm inspired to add some of these to my reading list for the year. I've promised myself I'd read much more purposefully and seriously this year. So far I'm doing well - mind you it is only February!

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