Arbitrary lists of books and the contrary librarian

This meme is doing the rounds in the #blogjune crowd (whom I’m still following – they add a touch of interest to my feed reader which for the most part is full of patchwork, stitching, sewing and fashion blogs with a dash of cooking and the few library blogs I had wanted to keep up with.)

See, I have books (note: most of these I *have* read – this is the “Cathy Collection” at our house). Notice too, the lovely lot of lego above the shelves. It’s a good thing I don’t manage physical collections anymore, I’d have to counsel me over the state of these shelves. 🙂

I remembered that I did this meme in 2009 when my Dad shared it on Facebook and therefore cheated a little and copied it from there, checking to see if I had improved on the figure (yes, four books).  The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (I had joel read me the first two, but I fell asleep a lot so I don’t think it counts)

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling 

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee 

6 The Bible – not all the way through (kept getting bogged down in the books of kings)

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 – Required reading to join the Kelso family 😉

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 (if I was any kind of wife to Dr K I would have taken a stab at this one but no).

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 Tart

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

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 (read some but not all, not counted)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton (Read one but not all – not counted)

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

The result: better read than the BBC expects and less well read than I would like. That said I don’t really like the heavy type of books that seem to dominate this list or “bookclub picks” on the whole. Also I found it rather frustrating to have the one book that I hadn’t read by some authors appear on the list.  Louis De Berniers 3 books before Captain Corelli were fantastic (and I read those, but wasn’t interested in CC due to readers at my library’s enthusiastic recommendations – I’ve always had a hint of the contrarian about me).

This list raises the question (at least to me) why when I clearly love Austen, why nothing from the Bronte sisters? Probably should remedy this.

Also I don’t think I’d ever choose to read Dickens – I just don’t want to read depressing stories of Victorian England. Of course if you put a gun to my head or offered me money that would be a different story.  Offers to start at $1000 and over please.

One last thought – what would you put on your top 100 books?  I’d include something by Terry Pratchett and more Margaret Atwood (my favourite author, if I have to pick one).