Well, this meme of books keeps making the rounds. So the ones in bold are the ones I read.
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Bible
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving I was made to read this in a philosophy class. Total waste of time. Terrible book.
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – You don’t need to read this one. I predicted the ending by reading the first chapter.
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Hmm, more than I thought. Of course I might note that the following is not on this list.
Caesar’s Commentaries.
Cicero’s Collected Speeches.
Ray Bradbury’s F-451 and The Martian Chronicles
Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Lathe of Heaven
Meh.
Respects,
Steven Francis Murphy
Author of The Limb Knitter and Tearing Down Tuesday
North Kansas City, Missouri

10 comments
November 23, 2010 at 7:19 am
Mark Hubbard / Tribeless
I’ve read 37 of the 100; didn’t finish them all though. For example, Madame Bovary: bore-fest.
November 23, 2010 at 8:26 am
Mark Hubbard / Tribeless
Actually Murph, one on that list you’ve not read I reckon you ‘may’ like: no promises.
The Wasp Factory by Scottish author Iain ‘M’ Banks is good, as is all his science fiction.
Note they’ve got his moniker wrong on this list. He writes mainstream fiction ‘and’ science fiction: he writes mainstream fiction under the name Iain Banks, and his science fiction under Iain M. Banks (the M. denotes it’s a sci-fi. If you get a chance try one.)
November 23, 2010 at 9:38 am
Tribeless/MarkHubbard
Just looked up my reading log (I know, anal to keep a reading log, I keep a movie log also): my favourite Iain M. Banks was ‘Walking on Glass’.
November 23, 2010 at 12:01 pm
maggsworld
Only 13 I have not yet read – have read your additions.
November 23, 2010 at 12:41 pm
columpaget
I’ve only read 15, not including a bunch that I started, but couldn’t get in to.
I’m not with you on “The handmaid’s tale” though, I loved that one, mostly because of the dark humor in it
_The things they make us wear, they call them habits. A good name: They’re hard to break._
And because I was very interested in the situation of the main male character, which I felt could be read in many different ways. Was his interest in engaging intellectually with the female lead an attempt at atonement?
I also felt that Atwood was quite even-handed in showing that her dystopia oppressed its male members too, and that there were plenty of females willing to support it.
As for the ending, I thought her ending-after-the-ending appendum was a big mistake, much like the extra chapter on ‘A clockwork orange’. But there are some stories where you are supposed to see the ending coming at the outset, and it’s the inevitable plunge towards it that the book is about. 1984 is not going to end well, and you know that from the outset really, but that’s kind of the point. Also, just about any horror book/film ever written.
That said, now that I’ve thought of that, I quite like the idea of going into cinemas, and, the second the first frame of a horror movie appears, declaiming in a loud voice “Oh, it’s so obvious what’s going to happen! They’re all gonna die except for the frumpy virgin!” But, alas, I don’t have the courage to carry through on that idea.
I’m pleased to see ‘The secret history’ on here, as I thought I was the only one who liked it.
My list of things that should be on there:
I would swap ‘Frankenstien’ for ‘Dune’. I enjoyed ‘Dune’, but I’m not sure it’s that good.
Wuthering Heights? (Horrible, horrific, made me feel suicidal, but that was the point, and thus it was pretty successful).
Maybe something by William Gibson.
Colum
November 23, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Dylan Fox
Don’t know if it matters or not, but it’s not really a list by the BBC… http://www.purplecar.net/2009/03/how-do-memes-start-a-case-study-100-books-in-facebook/
It might at least explain some of the more odd entries…
November 23, 2010 at 3:14 pm
sfmurphy1971
Maybe there is more than one list going around. It has been floating around my facebook sphere for a couple of weeks now.
Per Atwood, I read Oryx and Crake (I normally call it Orc and Crackhead) and I found it to be the very personification of everything I hate about science fiction. It had THE MESSAGE which overrode everything of value in that novel.
Worse, there is theme in that novel that humans are bad and somebody ought to come along and bump us all of. Once you replace us with little cupie dolls things will be so much better.
Then there is Atwood’s “voice” which sounds like so much helium. I suspect if one were to listen to her in person it would always sound like she is on the breathless verge of an orgasm. So when I got a copy of The Tail, I got about as far as the first chapter, saw where it was going and put it back.
There is truth that you can say the same for horror films, which is why I don’t watch horror films.
Mark, can’t stand Banks. At all. I had a couple of his novels sent to me by a former friend. I simply couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to believe in the world he created.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
November 24, 2010 at 3:29 am
yankeedog
If these books don’t have lasers, or sharks, or (preferably) sharks with lasers, then I didn’t bother with these.
Seriously, I did read ‘Lord of the Flies’ in high school. Never again.
I found ‘Oryx and Crake’ and ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ to be OK. I can ignore the ‘message’ if the world is decently believable.
You might pick up Shute’s ‘A Town Like Alice’. I have read ‘On the Beach’, and found him to be fairly clever and entertaining. And it is set in Alice Springs-Australia’s gateway to, well, noplace in particular.
November 24, 2010 at 5:26 pm
sfmurphy1971
Those who enjoy lasers and sharks will be sent to the Speculative Fiction Reeducation Center for a proper headspace and timing adjustment, sir.
I hated Crackhead. I find Atwood to be unreadable.
A Town Like Alice sounds like an option. I’ll see about getting a copy.
Happy Turkey Day, Everyone.
Respects,
Murph
On the Outer Marches
November 26, 2010 at 12:43 am
PurpleCar (Christine Cavalier)
This meme has probably been around for about 3 years and the list keeps changing.