100 best reads of all time - how many have you read?

[Daniel]

Thirty-five and, sorry all, but I am going to give a bit more detail than just a count. Please skip on to the next post if too much information! Based on the things on here that I have read, this is a fantastic list, and I am eager to delve into some of the new territory (for me) that it maps out.

Read (or listened to as an unabridged audiobook):
• Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (twice)
• Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (twice)
• Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (twice)
• Hamlet - William Shakespeare (twice)
• The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (all three books)
• His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (all three books)
• The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
• Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
• The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
• The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
• Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Along with Cloud Atlas and Middlemarch, one of the best three on the list (in this reader’s opinion)
• Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
• The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
• Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
• Animal Farm - George Orwell
• Lord of the Flies - William Golding
• Life of Pi - Yann Martel
• A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
• Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
• Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
• The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
• A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
• Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - Along with Anna Karenina and Middlemarch, one of the best three on the list (in this reader’s opinion)
• Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (or did I only read Nabokov’s wonderful notes on this book in Lectures on Literature?)
• Charlotte's Web - EB White
• The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
• Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (audiobook)
• The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (audiobook)
• Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (audiobook)
• Middlemarch - George Eliot (audiobook) - Along with Cloud Atlas and Anna Karenina, one of the best three on the list (in this reader’s opinion)
• Bleak House - Charles Dickens (audio)
• Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (well, most of the stories, anyway)
• Complete Works of Shakespeare (I have read and/or seen several others besides Hamlet, but am not even close to getting through the “Complete Works”)
• The Bible (many but not all of the books)

Started but either got distracted by something else to read, or lost interest:
• Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
• The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
• Dune - Frank Herbert (as I recall this was fascinating…why did I stop?)
• Moby-Dick - Herman Melville (it was the chapter on the scientific classification of whales that brought things to a halt)
• Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

To be read soon (really…):
• War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (probably this year)
• Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Two recommended additions (and the list could be kept to 100 by deleting Hamlet—it’s already covered under the Complete Works—and The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe—it’s part of the Chronicles of Narnia):
• The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

[Tammy]

I went through a snobby phase after high school in which I only read classics, so I've read most of these. My count is 85. Most of them are fantastic books, but I wouldn't include A Secret History or Tess of the D'Ubervilles.

[Midge]

I have only read 16 of these books. I read an average of 1 book per week of all types but guess I have different taste than most.

[Devin]

Tammy wrote: "I went through a snobby phase after high school in which I only read classics, so I've read most of these. My count is 85. Most of them are fantastic books, but I wouldn't include A Secret Histor..."

Wow! I don't think that is snobby at all, I think it just shows an appreciation for the classics and an interest in learning. I am sort of in a 'classics phase' right now (which is probably why I don't think it's snobby, haha). Just finished Les Miserables, which I thought was a fantastic story, just way way way too long.

I have read 23 books on this list. And, like most, most of the rest are on my to-read list.

[Devan]

I read 15 of the first 25. Then I went downhill from there (32 in total). Though I think I'm getting credit for some books of dubious merit.

[Amy Nielsen]

I waited until I could see how many books the vast majority had read of them on the list before I decided whether or not to join this bookclub/group. If I was way under then I would have felt inadequate! But I read a respectable 25% of the 100 and have lots more of them on my book list although classics and Austen are not my faves at all although I've read a lot of them anyway. Also I doubt I'll be reading Shakespeare any time soon. I'm not too into cerebral reading at this point in my game. But I am was grateful to find this list because I need to get myself out of the YA Paranormal rut, if you get my meaning. I'm Hunger Games/The Maze Runner/DarkFevered out at least for awhile.

[Soad]

11 wow i feel small lol

[Mirvan.]

6 only huhuhuhuuh

[Sandy]

I've read 10 of these, but I made a decision a few years ago to widen my horizons in reading, so 16 more are on my mental TBR. I've also read the Bible my whole life and would imagine that I've covered it all in that time, but since I haven't kept track, I didn't count it.

[Soad]

John wrote: "6 only huhuhuhuuh"

dude 6??? thats sad lol come on they probably made u read at least 10 of those books in school.so sad (ha ha i dont feel small anymore!!) and i think more books should be added to that list like a million little pieces, where the red fern grows, a river runs through it, shiloh, sounder, i cant remember anymore right now but i'll add on later.

[Michael]

I read 37 this year, trying to read up to 150.

[Dianne]

I'v read 40, but a lot of them are on my TBR list.

I would have left off Hamlet and The DaVinci Code, and added The Pickwick Papers, which is one of the funniest books ever written.

[Candice]

At the age of 24 I have read 11!!!! I feel so accomplished. I'm such a geek, I know. A good portion of the ones I have read were for school (I went to a Catholic school) and more than half of the ones I haven't read are on my TBR list. That list seems to get longer rather than shorter but that's ok.

[Peggy]

I have read 42 of the books listed. I agree I would have not included The DaVinci Code or The Time Travelers Wife.

[Qwantu]

Tisha wrote: "Omg...only 16. :( I am so lame! I have half of them on my TBR list...particularly on my "movies seen...books to read list.""

I'm only at 16 too, Tisha! Got to get to reading!!!

[Ashley]

Only 8! Wow. I've read parts of some others, but never finished. I have most of these on my TBR pile or have seen the movie adaptions Yah, yah, they're never as good as the originals, I know. And while that's true, when you're a young kid trying to get through 18 century writing, you can be given some slack... right?) What's funny is I own a lot of Jane Austen, I just need to sit down and read through P&P again--the first time I read it (because I wanted to before I watched the BBC movie) I missed half of what was going on!

[Ginny]

I've read 68 from this list. I agree some of the books on this lilst are questionable.

[Sadie]

I've read 44 (and one more I think I read a long time ago, but wasn't sure). It's a pretty good list. But I think I wouldn't be able to say I'd read as many if we hadn't hit them in high school.

[Amanda]

22.....more than I thought!! What is everyones #1 from the list?

[Natasha]

I'm at 13 or so, but working my way up! A lot of these books just don't sound appealing to me, though.

[Fernanda]

I've only read 17 of them, though I have a lot more on my TBR list (:

[Catherine]

I've read 55, with a couple of the others on my TBR list - some as a result of school reading lists.

Like a couple of others, I wondered about both "Hamlet" and the complete works of Shakespeare being mentioned separately within the listing!

[Susan]

OK I counted out 62. Has anyone read the Bible? Shessh. The New Testament maybe. All the old testament "A man is worth 2 women" stuff is really annoying!

My least favorite is Lord of the Flies - William Golding. Yech!

Of the favorites, Dune, The Count of Monty Cristo and The Secret garden I still read every few years. Wonderful stories. Oh, also Pride and Prejudice. And A Town Like Alice. The Hichikers Guide to the Galaxy Series I have read three times I think. I laugh every time.

I am going to list my favorites on this list:

Dune - Frank Herbert
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (uh-hum!
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
Animal Farm - George Orwell
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Charlotte's Web - EB White
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Susan

[Joel]

38 ... so far. But thanks for the list. Great suggested reading in there.

[Shaun]

I have read 10. I guess I have some reading to do.

[Adele]

I have only read 21 so far but most of these are on my tbr

[Anish]

Only read 27 :-( miles to go yet,i guess!

[A.K.]

Not to be picky about the list but:

Why do Dumas, CS Lewis and Dickens get individual entries on the list? And yet Shakespeare only gets one entry for his complete works (14); which apparently doesn't include Hamlet (98)!

Sorry but I couldn't help myself. Lol :)

[Ashleigh]

I've read 27 off this list. I know it should be more, but many of the books on my been read list are not as popular. I tend to enjoy reading those types when I can because they're harder to find than the classics. But I really do need to get around to reading more of these

[Thomas]

I am at 14

Apparently the really good works of science fiction and fantasy didn't get much notice past C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, George Orwell, and Huxley.

What happened to Asimov? Isn't "I, Robot" required reading any more?

Perhaps you want to read a book with the worlds most widely recognized literary character? No Tarzan books in there. Sorry, only sold 35 million Edgar Rice Burroughs books, so he didn't make the list.

Other than that, I am surprised and the depth of the list, for only 100 titles it is very broad.

[Debbie]

I've only read 19 from this list. Some I'd like to read, others not so much. No one here is lame! Use a different list, and we'll all have a different count.

[Adam]

I've only read 13 .... unless I can count Pride And Prejudice And Zombies.

[[deleted user]]

For those of you wondering where this list came from it's a list compiled by the World Book Night UK people. They carried out an online poll in 2007 asking people what book(s) they couldn't live without.

So that's why there is Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare; The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe and The Chronicles of Narnia and why there is such a mix of books.

Here's an article about it.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar...

A new poll was carried out in 2011:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/...

http://www.worldbooknight.org/blog/it...

[Randy]

I remember when Harold Bloom came out with the Western Canon. Many took it as a kind of test in that if you hadn't read and studied those books then you weren't educated. But his real message in what was a great book is that these were the works which shaped and made the Western world what it is today. That got me to thinking about what were the books that shaped me? Being really honest with myself I then placed those books from my collection on the bookshelf closest to my desk: the Fu Manchu series, Philip K. Dick, Poe, Joseph Conrad, Eric Remarque, Adam Hall, John LeCarre, John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. To me, this is a much more interesting way to approach books rather than someone else's list.

[Dick]

31...but I would argue that several don't belong.

[Davee]

hmm, I've only read 5, but, I did a double-take on a few from this list. I know I should read a few more though.

[Susan]

28 on the 2007 list and 25 on the 2011 list but I own many of the others. I can see why there are duplications but would not call this the "Best" 100 books.

[Liz]

26! For me, that's good!! In fact, there are 10 more that I've been hankering to read for a very long time ... ;o)

[Jane]

Hi, 44 with several on my "should be" rather than to be read list.

[Cheryl]

22 at the moment, but I have several others sitting in "to be read" piles.

[Dave]

19. There are some incredible books on that list. And some absurd ones. Mitch Albom? Da Vinci Code? Jokes?

[Brie]

Sadly, only 16. I also have many on my to-read list. I also agree with others that some books on this list shouldn't be there. Such as The Lovely Bones (I've read so many poor reviews of this book).

[Aoibhínn]

I've read 28 of them and I have some of them on my tbr list.

[Karen M]

I couldn't remember if I ever commented on this but I've read at least 35 of the books but a few I couldn't be positive and since am just too lazy to check I didn't include them in my count.

Someone earlier questioned Dan Brown being on the list, well, I really question Bridget Jones' Diary. LOL Enjoyed the book but compared to Jane Austen or Arthur Conan Doyle, well you see my point. LOL

[Jeanne]

Read 44 off this list so far. So many left to go!

[Lori]

I've read 28 so far but I pick away at the list. Everyone seems to have a challenge list or a goal. My goal is to pick away and read 1 classic per year. Last year I read The Remains of the Day and this year I'm pretty determined to finish Bleak House that I just can't seem to finish on my Kindle. This is the year for it!

[✿Claire✿]

I've read 30 and have most of the rest on my TBR list.

Read
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
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
29. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
40. Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
68. Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

TBR:
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
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
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
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 - A. S. 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
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
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
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

[Nan]

37 for me. Lots of great books on the list but some of them are head-scratchers. Bridget Jones's Diary—really?

[Karen]

42 for me, can't count the Bible since I haven't read the entire book, has anyone? But how did some of these books get on there? Mitch Albom? Bridget Jones Diary? Seriously? seems very strange.

[Kari]

43! But one of those is Moby Dick, so that should count double...