100 books of all time - how many have you read?

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

So I was looking at the 1001 books you must read before you die and found it very depressing that I'd only read 1% ha ha.

http://www.listsofbests.com/list/2222...

So I found this list in another group - The Big Read - 100 reads of all time. How many have you read? I've read 11 so a little bit better percentage wise :)

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 Faulks
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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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
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
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 - 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
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 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

[Allison]

Oy, I've read 12... but most are on my TBR list so that's good!

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

Have you had a look at the 1001 books list! I haven't heard of half of them. This list made me feel better :)

[Allison]

lol yes I've read about 5 on that list! I definitely haven't heard of a lot of those either! Oh boy.

[Jaime]

I've read 27 but I own many of those books and am hoping to get to them at some point! At this point, I don't get too much reading done. I have a 19- month- old son that keeps me very busy. I try to read after he goes to sleep and end up nodding off! Gosh, I feel old!!!

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

I've got all the time in the world at the moment as I'm job hunting and I'm still not going to get through either of these lists ha ha :)

[Heidi]

Ooh I'm feeling very smug as I've read 44 of them...

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

ooof smugness :P ha ha no, well done you! I feel as if I should have read a lot of these books. Shame on me!

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

I've stolen this link from another group. Very cool, will tell you exactly what percentage of books you've read of the 1001 books to read before you die. Also, how many you need to read on average each year to complete the list before you die :) Nice!!

http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/?pag...



I've just realised that this is a new addition of the list and some of the books on the original list that I have read have now gone :( I have only read 0.9% of the books now :(

[Heidi]

Thanks for this link - I'll have a look and see what the differences are!

[The Book Whisperer (aka Boof)]

I've read 27 too. Does it count if I have them on my shelf at home, waiting to be read? If so then, it's about 60! (LOL).

[Victoria]

I've read 39! Woo hoo! Although feel that classing all of Shakespeare's works as one (and all the Harry Potter books too) is a little unfair... that's a whole lot of reading!!

Off to try that 1001 thing now...

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

If I include ones that I own then I've got 21! Think I'm starting to cheat now to make myself feel better ha ha!

[Beth]

I've read 28 of them.

[Liz]

I've read 33. A lot of these books can be found in high school and college curriculum (I'm a junior in college). Plus a lot of these books are on my to read list.

[Jaime]

Yeah, I remember a lot of these being choices when I was in High School (some time ago!).

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

Me too!! Although I also remember school nearly ruining 'Pride and Prejudice' and 'To Kill a Mockingbird' for me! Think we analysed those books to death!

[Jaime]

Yeah, I hear you Jenny! That happened with A Tale of Two Cities for me. It just took us too long to read. The teacher just kept beating it to death. I have been hesitant of Dickens since but I think I may pick up Great Expectations soon.

[Heather]

I have read 34 of them and I have far more than that on my shelves to still read.

btw, the list is missing #44.

[Mandy]

I've read 15 and have plenty of them on my shelf to be read next year so I feel pretty happy with myself after comparing my books to this list. Some lists I don't even make a dent in!

[Jenny, honorary mod - inactive]

So it is Heather!! You have a good eye! I got this from another group so we'll probably never know what it is :P

[Terri]

Woohoo! I've read 34 of these - I'm impressed hahaha!
Off to look at the 1001 books link ... I have no hope of reading all those, I'm sure!

[Cecily]

Of the 100 books list, I've read all the first ten (well not all OF the Bible, but lots of it in my youth) and 55 in total, though some were many years ago and not on my Goodreads shelves, which only include things I read in the last 4 years or so. Also, there were some authors where I've read several of their books, but not the one on the list - not sure what that implies.

There are some quirks though: The COMPLETE works of Shakespeare is a little harsh for all but the keenest of Shakespeare fans (but Hamlet is listed separately). On the other hand, it has the Chronicles of Narnia and then The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe - so I got 2 for that.

And one book I'd never heard of.

[Alice]

Hey CFSR over 50% good going there!

I've 37 and possible a few more but couldn't remember if I had or not (pretty sure some of them i prob read as a child just can't remember!) so didn't count them!

I'm going to take a look at the 1001. I just don't think i'm gonna be able to look down the entire list that sounds like it might take a long time!

[Alice]

Ok I have read 56 of the updated version of 1001 books to read before you die which i believe is 5.6% if you pretend there are only 1000 books!

I have school and my parents (when trying desperately to stop me reading point horrors in my teens) to thank for some of those because if it wasn't for them I wouldn't have read any before 1980 or even 1990! And those written after the 80's I was very much relying on the fact that nearly every book Ian McEwan has written was on the list as he's my favourite author!

I read on one person's blog that 124 books dropped of the amount he had read when he retook it with the updated list - so maybe if i look through the older list i may even get as high as 6%!!

[Alice]

nope went down doing the earlier list only got 4.6% which I should've worked out would've happened as it's the later books i've read!

[Dorottya]

21 - as a non-native speaker, it is not THAT bad... it could be a lot better, though, and a lot of them are on my tbr list, too...

[Pragya]

I have read 19 so far.

[Almeta]

Dorottya wrote: "21 - as a non-native speaker, it is not THAT bad... it could be a lot better, though, and a lot of them are on my tbr list, too..."

Boy Dorottya, you are sure reviving some interesting threads.

I have some of Boxall's 1001 B4 You Die on my chunksters coming up soon. No way will I ever read them all, but I now have to go look at the links that were provided.

I think I'll start with the 100 list first to boost my confidence!☻ I'm claiming 27. I have read a few more, but it was so long ago that I barely remember them, so I think a re-read (as an adult) is in order!

Shamefully, I have read very few of the classics. Have been reading more contemporary material.

ETA: Aw the links are gone. :(

[Lisa]

I have read 24 of these so far and have several more of them on my TBR or wishlist.

[Almeta]

Judy wrote: "I've read 60 of these and have 2 more on my list to read this year. This is a really good list. I'm glad you posted it, Jenny."

Show Off!!!!☺☺☺

[Janice, Moderator]

I've read 31 of them - half as many as Judy.

(LOL, Almeta)

[Marnie]

28 for me...great list. Most of them are on my TBR ... Sigh.

[Almeta]

Marnie wrote: .... Most of them are on my TBR ... Sigh."

Most of them are on my TBR as well, but really they feel more like SBRs (Should be Read), so I avert my eyes and chose something else!

[Roz]

I can claim 4 recently (in the pars year or so) and 21 that I read a long time ago (high school, college or at least 25 years ago) that I need to reread.
Now I have even more on my tbr shelf.

[Janice, Moderator]

That's a good point, Almeta. While there are some great books on that list, it seems that there is an attitude that certain books should be read. Where did that come from? Who decides which books are essential reading, and why?

[Duane]

I have read 58 of the books and currently reading 2 more.

[Marnie]

Some books that are on that list I feel I should read because they are talked about so much in pop culture. Pride and Prejudice, until last Toppler, was an example.

Book snobs annoy me. Having said that I have been trying to read more classics this year because,so far, I seem to be enjoying them but I also have a Johanna Lindsey waiting for me at the library so- go figure.

[Roz]

Good point, Janice. Who does choose what is an essential read? What are the criteria? There are several English / American classics here and then you have Bridget Jones's Diary and The Five People You Meet in Heaven stuck in there. I read the last one, but it was probably because of all the hype surrounding it at the time.

[Pragya]

60 books is wow, Judy.

[Almeta]

Duane wrote: "I have read 58 of the books and currently reading 2 more."

Another overachiever! Good for you!☺☺☺

[Tejas Janet]

Heidi wrote: "Ooh I'm feeling very smug as I've read 44 of them..."

Me too... but they are many more on here that I still want to get to!!

[Marie Claude]

I have read 25 but a lot of the others are on my TBR...

[Elsbeth]

I've read 30 - more than I expected! And a few more coming up...

[Pragya]

I was comparing notes with a friend and he has read 90 of those! o_O He's only 27 years old! How did he manage that? I am sorry I even asked him. :/

[Lisa]

Pragya wrote: "I was comparing notes with a friend and he has read 90 of those! o_O He's only 27 years old! How did he manage that? I am sorry I even asked him. :/"

That is VERY impressive! I wonder what his secret is?

[Pragya]

Lisa wrote: "Pragya wrote: "I was comparing notes with a friend and he has read 90 of those! o_O He's only 27 years old! How did he manage that? I am sorry I even asked him. :/"

That is VERY impressive! I wan..."

He says he started reading really early while in school but so did I. :(

[Lisa]

Pragya wrote: "Lisa wrote: "Pragya wrote: "I was comparing notes with a friend and he has read 90 of those! o_O He's only 27 years old! How did he manage that? I am sorry I even asked him. :/"

That is VERY impr..."

Same here. We obviously read lots of books that were not on the list ;)

[Rusalka, Moderator]

37. Although some of those are series combined which makes it hard to count. And then you have the Chronicles of Narnia, and then under it The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe which is part of the Chronicles.

I think I own most of the rest of them... one day...

[Gavin]

Read 17 of them.