100 books meme

[jinian]

From jenett this time. With snark/corrections.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling (I haven't read book 7, just the sporkings)
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'Ubervilles - 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 Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (because of jenett, actually)
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 A subset of 33
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
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-Time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (for high school class)
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
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 (Other Ishiguro, yes.)
85 Madam 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 - 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 (My dad loves Australia.)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 A subset of 14
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


I suppose I really ought to read the Brontes, but I bounced off them hard as a teen. Is anything else here worth a few hours of my time?

Comments

[tiassa]

Wuthering Heights - I loathed this book. It was a handbook for messed-up relationships that were supposed to be "romantic." Like an old fashioned version of Twilight, maybe?

Tess of the D'Ubervilles - I read this in high school and I remember liking it, but I don't remember much about it. It was very Victorian, though. (Meaning that they have sex in the spaces between sentences and I had to go back and try to see if I'd missed something.)

Catcher in the Rye - I never had to read this one in school so I tried it a few years ago and...really didn't like it. The main character annoyed the crap out of me and I spent the whole book wanting to punch him in the face. So.

The Time Traveler's Wife - This one had a really interesting concept and I liked it for that, but the author seriously needs a thesaurus so she stops using the word "cock" constantly. Seriously.

The Great Gatsby - DON'T READ IT.

The Grapes of Wrath - Only read if you feel like being depressed.

Memoirs of a Geisha - I spent the whole book twitching at inaccuracies. The movie was tons worse in that respect. But. It was an okay story?

The Da Vinci Code - DON'T READ IT.

count of Monte Cristo - Read this. Dumas is, as always, overfond of the sound of his own narrative voice. Or paid by the word, probably. But I liked it.

[katybeth]

Catcher in the Rye - I never had to read this one in school so I tried it a few years ago and...really didn't like it. The main character annoyed the crap out of me and I spent the whole book wanting to punch him in the face. So.

I was assigned this in high school and adored it. I identified strongly with the main character, even though he was nothing like me in a lot of ways. I don't recall whether I reread it later, certainly not recently, and I don't know whether it would hold up, were I to read it as an adult. I think that it got me at exactly the right time in my life.

[katybeth]

Anna Karenina - I read this in my late 20s, and enjoyed it.

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

Wuthering Heights-- one of my favorite novels of all time; it's not meant to be a romance novel, it's a high Gothic ghost story about a particular kind of passion leading to what many would consider damnation and the characters who get it consider Just Fine, Thank You.

One Hundred Years of Solitude was a frustrating, elliptical, gorgeous, and ultimately worthwhile experience.

I have been reading Ulysses since January. I admire it profoundly, but I've never met anything takes so much brain.

I read The Wasp Factory once as an adolescent and still remember individual sentences, which may well mean that I recommend it-- it definitely made an impression-- but I would like to reread it before giving it more than a tentative rec, because, y'know, I was twelve. Certainly both brilliantly done and unique.

I hated Madame Bovary passionately and desperately until my A.P. English teacher convinced me it was meant to be read as black comedy, at which point I only found it mildly annoying.

I very highly recommend the entirety of the Divine Comedy and wish that people wouldn't stop at the Inferno; the other two are certainly less accessible but I feel it is a problem to focus only on conceptions of Hell to the detriment of conceptions of Heaven. The translation I suggest for a first read is the Ciardi; I also like the Dorothy Sayers, but not right off the bat. Neither of those is best for academic purposes, but Dante translations have that problem where they're either in translationese or badly flawed in some major linguistic way. We have twenty-three translations in the house and our resident Dante scholar admits satisfaction with none of them.

I love Moby-Dick but I will be the first to tell you it is odd of me. Another unexpectedly funny book. The way to tell whether you like Moby-Dick is to start reading it, and if you find the description of the painting that comes up very soon hilarious, you should be okay, and if not go read something else.

[firecat]

Jane Eyre is one of my favorite books ever, but Wuthering Heights felt like hundreds of pages of angsty teenage LJ posts.

I really enjoyed these as audiobooks:
War and Peace
David Copperfield
Vanity Fair
Moby-Dick

Count of Monte Cristo was pretty good on audio too.

[firecat]

I liked Memoirs of a Geisha right up until the last 25 pages or so, and then I retroactively hated the whole thing.

[tiassa]

Wuthering Heights felt like hundreds of pages of angsty teenage LJ posts.

....yes.