A Diversion

(Updated to note: A strange thing, but for some reason the bold I used to highlight books read has gone all the way through the post if you look through an RSS feed. In that case, the books I have read havea number to the right.)

Well, Triss and I have been grappling with big ideas lately-- virtue, magnanimity, socialization-- and both of us are in need of a diversion. Hers is a Redwall book. I thought I would see how many of these BBC Top 100 Books I have read. I enjoyed seeing the Headmistress', Cindy's and Mama Squirrel's lists. I also enjoyed the true confession time on Dominion Family, but I came to the post late and decided not to comment. Just for the record, I absolutely abhorred Wuthering Heights. Could not see the point in it except madness, despair and death. Yuck.

I will bold the ones I have read and italicize the ones I want to read. The numbers to the right of the bolded titles are me counting how many books on this list that I've read. (Look at me counting, look at me counting, Pooh!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen 1

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 2

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (This was the first hard book I read by choice. I started at the beginning five or six times, getting a little further into the book each time before I gave up. I finally got all the way through it when I was in college.) 3

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee 4

6 The Bible (I have never made it completely through, every word, but I am still going to count it.) 5

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 6

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I can't remember if I have actually read it or not. Isn't that awful? I think I might have read it in high school or college, but there is a good possibility I only heard about the storyline.)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (This book was my constant companion when I was a teen.) 7

12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller 8

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (not completely-- I have read Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, and we just started A Midsummer Night's Dream. I think that's it.)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 9

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I really, really, really like this book. It's so different from your average romance novel. So much to think about. I like reading George Eliot. Silas Marner was great. I couldn't get into Romola, though.)10

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell 11

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 12

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (This is another one I am not sure if I read or not. The book I'm thinking of may be a different one by Nathaniel Hawthorne.)

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 13

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 14

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I probably read this ten to fifteen times in middle school. Drove Dad crazy how many times I would reread my favorites. He finally went out to the bookstore one day and came home with a bag full of classics to encourage me to read new things.) 15

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame 16

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I only just learned how to pronounce the title last year. And kept Mr. Honey in stitches until I got it through my thick skull that it is An' na Ka-re'-ni-na and not An'-na Ka-re-nee'-na. Ahem.)

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis 17

34 Emma - Jane Austen (My favorite Jane Austen. Mr. Knightley. Need I say more?) 18

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 19

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis 20

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 21

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 22

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 23

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery 24

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood 25

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding 26

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 27

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (Remind me to tell you about the time I was in an original Nashville dinner theater musical called The Miserable Ones of the Tale of Two Cities-- the music of Les Miz and the plot of A Tale of Two Cities. I got to be Lucie Manette. In a hoopskirt and corkscrew curls. It was fun.) 28

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 29

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I never would have sought this author out, but I had some sort of South American literature class in college and read two of his books, and a couple other books by South American authors that were very hard for me to get through at the age of eighteen. I had a Bible-as-Literature class on the New Testament also. The teacher was a non-believer. Not fun. I had a very good pastor who helped me through it.) 30

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Again, I may have read this in college, but possibly not. I went through a Steinbeck phase, very shortlived. I know I read Travels with Charley and Grapes of Wrath, and possibly one other.)

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I have always been curious about this book since I heard about the book Reading Lolita in Tehran. I don't really want to read Lolita, but I feel like it is probably a prerequisite to reading the other.)

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 (Triss and I started this last year, were enjoying it, but never finished it.)

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 31

80 Possession - AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens 32

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker 33

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 34

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Mr. Honey and I are big Sherlock Holmes fans. We even listened to the old Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce radio shows as we drove across country on our honeymoon.) 35

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 36

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 37

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (My first foray into Shakespearian tragedy. It was hard.) 38

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl 39

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 40