100 Best Books

A booklist from the Deputy Headmistress. As she did, I've bolded the ones I've read, italicized the ones I want to read, left alone the ones I don't have an opinion on and put a comment after those I really liked or disliked.

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 - I can't remember if I've actually read this one all of the way through
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - not planning to read it either
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens I've read it once and I'm reading it to my older children right now
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - I much prefer Far From the Madding Crowd
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I've read and/or seen an assortment but not all of them.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - I might have read this but can't remember so it doesn't count.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - heard enough about the steamy bits to decide I wasn't going to read it.
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 - I may have tried this once but obviously didn't get far
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 - see Crime & Punishment
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 This was for the library book club last year. I found it to be so sad and tragic, especially since the main character didn't seem to realize how sad and tragic it really was
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - not planning to either
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I think I read the first 5 pages and off it went to the library. I thought it was boring.
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving Why is this one considered to be such a classic? I found it tawdry and sad.
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - fun read!
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - and, of course, all the books in the series. Anne of Ingleside is my favourite.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - no thank you
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding Junior High - I'm not asking my kids to read it!
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - again for the library book club. Ick.
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - another one that seems to be recommended as a classic that I didn't get
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 - very interesting and different but at least not as icky as some.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - no, thank you
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - highschool. I think I liked his writing or at least the word pictures.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov :P
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold :p
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 Alborn
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
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo I struggled through this in highschool and eventually finished it. I started it again about 3 or 4 years ago and couldn't get through all the political meanderings. One of these days, I'll read it again and skip those parts!

I think this is a funny list because it's got such a variety of books on it. I guess everyone has a chance at it, anyway.

What about you?