rurounihime | Book List and ranting about said Book List

Gacked from Jamie2109, totally. ^__^

NOW. First, a note:

ETA: I am really irked that people took it upon themselves to alter the BBC's original list. No wonder I found this version so untrustworthy. I am going to edit my post eventually in light of the new info.

I am going to be good and only bold the titles that I have completely read (rather than read part of and not finished, even if they were fabulous) or have had read to me in totality. And in the case of things like A Christmas Carol, I am not counting having seen the play, but rather having read the actual book.

I'm going to italicize the ones I have read most (or much) of/have had most read to me, etc.

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
6. The Bible (or bits of it, anyway)
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 Traveler'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
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 Meaney - 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
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 - 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
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

Sha-BAM. *grins wildly* 24 read in completion, 6 more in partial. And I own several of the others, but haven't read them yet.

And may I ask where they get off offering only snippets of the Bible as a choice while including ALL of Shakespeare (which means the sonnets, long poems, and plays, all you naysayers) and ALL of Sherlock Holmes (which includes several novels and NUMEROUS short stories)?? What the fudge? *shakes head*

As for my personal faves:

Number 72 gets a major shout out here. It surprised me with how truly frightening a novel it was, and remains one of my favorite vampire stories ever. Also, you can't call yourself a vampire fan until you've read this one. Sorry.

Number 94 also gets props for being incredibly gripping, for being incredibly well-written, and for being about bunnies yet not being a kids' book in the slightest. I've read it twice. I love it.

And of course, I could not post this list without stating that number 49 is my absolute FAVORITE book ever. Wow. It's the best book I've ever read. I've read it at least three times, possibly four.

Another Bunch O' Gripe Because I Feel Like It: They include Harry Potter and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and yet there is no mention of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. *frown* Also: Hamlet but no Romeo and Juliet? No Macbeth? No Midsummer Night's Dream? Dude, if we are going to make an exception of Hamlet, we might as well lengthen the list and make an exception of the other plays, and hey, why not of the individual Sherlock Holmes novels while we're at it? Why not say "Everything by Jane Austen"? Where's Toni Morrison? And what the heck is with the Narnia Chronicles in full followed right away by LW&W? This list is shifty. I don't think I like it.

On a less crazy note, read Catch-22. Read it. I've never laughed so hard in my life. ^__^