Thursday 7 December 2017

Goodreads 100 Books to Read Before You Die

A fabulous list from the Goodreads folks. I would actually like to read most of these books before I die. There are some serious admissions in my reading. Rather large holes that I will hope to fill some time. 

There's a few exceptions of course. I can't imagine that I'll ever try to read Ulysses in this lifetime. I might give an audio version a go at some stage, as I can listen to things that I'd never be able to read. I'm currently a third of the way through the Moby Dick Big Read which is way further than I thought I would ever manage to do. 


Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen


To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee


1984 - George Orwell


The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald


The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger


Animal Farm - George Orwell





Catch- 22 - Joseph Heller


Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte


Great Expectations - Charles Dickens


Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte


Lord of the Flies - William Golding (see my review)


Little Women - Louisa May Alcott


Brave New World - Aldous Huxley


Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy


Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell


Charlotte's Web - E.B. White


The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas


The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck


Ulysses - James Joyce


100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien


Dracula - Bram Stoker


Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad


The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien (see my review)


The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood


Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck


The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams


On The Road - Jack Kerouac


Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov


The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (see my review)


Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie


Atonement - Ian McEwan


Middlemarch - George Eliot


A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens


Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery


The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (see my review)


Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier


War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy


The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown


The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry


Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I did it! My review of the first half)


Persuasion - Jane Austen


Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert


David Copperfield - Charles Dickens


The Secret History - Donna Tart


Life of Pi - Yann Martel


Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden


Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (currently reading)



I'm going to read Les Mis in 2018!

The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffeneger

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (see my review)


A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving


The Five People You Meet in Heaven - Mitch Albom


Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy


The Color Purple - Alice Walker


Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini


Emma - Jane Austen


Dune - Frank Herbert


Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone - J.K. Rowling


Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll


Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens


Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh


Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy


Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding


Watership Down - Richard Adams (see my review)


The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (see my review)


Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray


The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne


Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury


Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks


A Town Like Alice - Nevile Shute





The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle


Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen


A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (see my review)


The Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis (2.5/7)


A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole


The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath


Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne


The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis


His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman


The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon


Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (see my review)


A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry


The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins


The Call of the Wild - Jack London (see my review)


Beloved - Toni Morrison


Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut


A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth


Hamlet - William Shakespeare


Bleak House - Charles Dickens


The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time - Mark Haddon


The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro


Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell


Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll


Inferno - Dante


Notes from a Small Island - Bill Bryson


Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons


Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain


The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold


Frankenstein - Mary Shelley



I'm rather toying with the notion of this one,
a new annotated version


45/100 (I've included books that I gave a good crack, but may not have finished for whatever reason in pink)

1 comment:

Sue Bursztynski said...

I've read and finished 42 of them, and had a go at about ten others. More if you count His Dark Materials and Narnia, which are, after all, series. Interesting!

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