The Challenge

I received a BBC list of the top 100 books you should read a couple of months ago from a few people on Facebook. I never thought much of it until David and I started talking one day and he said that he would be interested in reading the list. Since he isn't much of a reader (other than text books and his training manuals at work), I thought this would be a great opportunity to get us reading something other than Strawberry Shortcake books (although these can be quite entertaining) and books on fingerprinting.

So, I present you with the list. I reserve the right to not read a few of them (which I will keep to myself, but will add a classic or two here or there), look forward to rereading several of them, am confused as to why some of them are on this list (The Lovely Bones, really?), shutter at the thought of reading several of them again (1984, I hated you in high school and nothing has changed), and I have honestly never heard of a few of them. Of course, I looked this up on the BBC's website and they had a different list there, so we will have to pick the one that we like better. Even though there are some on here that I would rather not read, they just have the Harry Potter series listed as one whole thing and, since I have been ,begging asking David to read those for years, I think we will stick with this one. The other one has them listed out and knocks some of the books off, but not necessarily good ones. This challenge, of course, will probably take us until our oldest is in high school, but at least we will try. I picked up Les Miserables and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory from the library the other day. I am reading Charlie to the girls and they seem to really enjoy it, even though there are not many pictures.

I will be honest, I wasn't much of a reader until I was a young adult. I was like my kids and couldn't stand anything that didn't have pictures or that didn't have pictures of boys (ah, Bop and Teen Beat, I kept you afloat in the late 80s and early 90s). Therefore, many of these books would have been used as bookends for magazines or very short stories. So, I am conquering my fear and am starting out with one of the longest books I have ever read (pathetic, I know) other than the Bible. Victor Hugo, we have a date with destiny and I am actually quite excited to delve into your depressing story and to soak in its top 100 goodness!

*Please feel free to join us on our adventure into the literary world. There is no time limit (especially since I will end up putting which ever book I am reading down for Suzanne Collins sequel to The Hunger Games when it comes out in September).

**Do any of you have a Kindle? I know that it saves trees, but I love the smell and feel of a new book. I don't know if I could do it. Sorry Al Gore.

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
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 Hitch Hiker’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
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
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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
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
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
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 Adam
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