I love to read. It's not something I've always loved and with so much going on in my life, I have to consciously make time for it now. Isn't that how it always works? You figure out you love something right when you stop having time for it. I want to instill a love for books in my girls. I didn't grow up reading a lot, but I want to make an effort to make reading a big part of my kid's lives. Lead by example is my thought, here.
I searched the internet for a top 100 books list and most seemed to be made up of the same type of book (classics, religious, popular, etc). I happened upon the GoodReads top 100 list and thought it was a good combo of all types of books. I thought I'd take a crack at reading most of them. Obviously there will be some that I won't read. The Book of Mormon, for example (I question the #2 status of this one and I know enough about that religion not to read the book), The Bible (way too many words to make it a part of this reading list for me) or the Shakespeare plays (didn't like them in high school, can't imagine they've changed or I've changed that much). ETA: I went ahead and replaced the books that I don't plan to read along with 3 of the twilight series books and 2 of the Harry Potter series books with recommendations from my friends Kim and Elizabeth (who are my reading go-to girls...they've done the legwork and they know what's good).
I'm seriously going to give this list my best effort in the coming months/years, we'll see how it goes!
Key
- BOLD: Read
- UNDERLINE: Read previously and plan to re-read
- ITALICS: Replacement book for one I don't plan on reading
- PURPLE: Currently Reading (or I have the book in line to read)
1 To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) by Harper Lee
2 The Secret Garden (1911) by Frances Hodgson Burnett
3 Pride and Prejudice (1813) by Jane Austen
4 Twilight (2005) by Stephenie Meyer
5 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964) by Ronald Dahl
6 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) by Ken Kesey
7 1984 (1949) by George Orwell
8 Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Brontë
9 The Richest Man in Babylon (1955) George S. Clason
10 The Catcher in the Rye (1945) by J.D. Salinger
11 Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl (1947) by Anne Frank
12 Little Women (1868) by Louisa May Alcott
13 Gone With The Wind (1936) by Margaret Mitchell
14 The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by C.S. Lewis
15 The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry
16 The Kite Runner (2003) by Khaled Hosseini
17 A Christmas Carol (1843) by Charles Dickens
18 The Great Gatsby (1925) by F. Scott Fitzgerald
19 The Count of Monte Cristo (1844) by Alexandre Dumas
20 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979) by Douglas Adams
21 Ender's Game (1985) by Orson Scott Card
22 Anne of Green Gables (1905) by L.M. Montgomery, Margaret Atwood (Introduction)
23 Crime and Punishment (1866) by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24 The Time Traveler's Wife (2003) by Audrey Niffenegger
25 Les Misérables (1862) by Victor Hugo
26 The Little Prince (1943) by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
27 Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler
28 One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) by Gabriel García Márquez, Gregory Rabassa (Translator)
29 The Alchemist (1988) by Paulo Coelho
30 The Princess Bride (1973) by William Goldman
31 East of Eden (1952) by John Steinbeck
32 The Grapes of Wrath (1939) by John Steinbeck
33 Animal Farm (1945) by George Orwell
34 Memoirs of a Geisha (1997) by Arthur Golden
35 A Million Little Pieces (2003) James Frey
36 Lolita (1955) by Vladimir Nabokov
37 Lord of the Flies (1954) by William Golding
38 Walden (1854) by Henry David Thoreau
39 A Wrinkle in Time (1962) by Madeleine L'Engle
40 Anna Karenina (1873) by Leo Tolstoy
41 Catch-22 (1961) by Joseph Heller
42 Life of Pi (2001) by Yann Martel
43 Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) by Kurt Vonnegut
44 A Tale of Two Cities (1859) by Charles Dickens
45 Watership Down (1972) by Richard Adams
46 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1865) by Lewis Carroll
47 A Thousand Splendid Suns (2006) by Khaled Hosseini
48 The Poisonwood Bible (1998) by Barbara Kingsolver
49 Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë
50 Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (1997) by J.K. Rowling
51 Dune (1965) by Frank Herbert
52 Winnie-The-Pooh (1926) by A.A. Milne
53 Water for Elephants (2006) by Sara Gruen
54 Brave New World (1932) by Aldous Huxley
55 The Road (2006) by Cormac McCarthy
56 The Fountainhead (1943) by Ayn Rand
57 The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) by Oscar Wilde
58 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) by Mark Twain
59 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) by Betty Smith
60 The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (1983) by Reduced Shakespeare Company
61 Angela's Ashes (1996) by Frank McCourt
62 The Book Thief (2005) by Markus Zusak
63 The Da Vinci Code (2003) by Dan Brown
64 The Hobbit: Or There and Back Again (1937) by J.R.R. Tolkien
65 Night (1958) by Elie Wiesel
66 The Pillars of the Earth (1989) by Ken Follett
67 The Giving Tree (1964) by Shel Silverstein
68 Outlander (1991) by Diana Gabaldon
69 The Brothers Karamazov (1880) by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Richard Pevear (Translator)
70 Atlas Shrugged (1957) by Ayn Rand
71 A Prayer for Owen Meany (1988) by John Irving
72 Don Quixote (1605) by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
73 Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker
74 The Lovely Bones (202) by Alice Sebold
75 Sense and Sensibility (1811) by Jane Austen
76 The Iliad (600) by Homer, Robert Fagles (Translator)
77 Moby Dick (1850) by Herman Melville
78 War and Peace (1865) by Leo Tolstoy, Henry Gifford (editor)
79 Of Mice and Men (1937) by John Steinbeck
80 The Old Man and the Sea (1952) by Ernest Hemingway
80 Middlesex (2002) by Jeffrey Eugenides
82 Lonesome Dove (1920) by Larry McMurtry
83 The Bell Jar (1963) by Sylvia Plath
84 The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1983) by Milan Kundera
85 Siddhartha (1922) by Hermann Hesse
86 The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood
87 Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) by Zora Neale Hurston
88 Emma (1815) by Jane Austen, Fiona J. Stafford (Editor)
89 On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac
90 The Glass Castle: A Memoir (2005) by Jeannette Walls
91 All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) by Erich Maria Remarque
92 The Master and Margarita (1966) by Mikhail Bulgakov
93 The Red Tent (1997) by Anita Diamant
94 Pygmalion (1914) by George Bernard Shaw
95 A Clockwork Orange (1962) by Anthony Burgess
96 The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999) by Stephen Chbosky
97 Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1888) by Thomas Hardy
98 The Name of the Rose (1980) by Umberto Eco
99 Eat, Pray, Love (2006) by Elizabeth Gilbert
100 Romeo and Juliet (1595) by William Shakespeare
That's all I got for now.
18 reactions:
Looks like a good list and I think I've read about half of them. I'm ever thankful that my Mom molded me into a "reader." I never looked back and still love to read. I'm a big Shakespeare fan, but I think you have to love it to get through it. In HS I had a great English teacher who took the time to teach us how to interpret the poetry and I think that really helped.
yea, I knew you'd have a ton of these crossed off the list. I think it's a pretty wide variety of genres, huh? As far as the Shakespeare stuff goes, I just do not enjoy reading a few lines to really try to decipher what it means beyond the words. I respect it though! Wish I liked it, for sure. Your mom did a good thing with the reading when you were a kid. I'm determined to get my girls to pick books over TV.
I just printed a similar list to tackle this year...though mine is pretty much all classics..many of which I haven't read since high school. I find it interesting that the Bible is lower on the list than Twilight. LOL. I love me some Twilight...but c'mon.
It's not hard to do with kids I don't think. Not that I have any experience, but I think if you start early and make it a "fun" thing to begin with that they will always find it to be fun. Make going to the library and bookstore a treat. It still is for me! Also probably making them read a variety to stuff to find out what they are really into (when they're older of course) is good I think. I've always been into mysteries and crime fiction starting with Nancy Drew and moving into to stuff for adults.
Thanks for posting the list. it was fun to see how many I've read... 17 (not counting shakespear, which I agree, hated in HS, not going to like them now... and bom). If I had to suggest a next read... Pillars of the Earth is my favorite book of all time, followed by East of Eden! Good luck with the list :)
haha...tricia, I know! I don't think the Bible should be on this list to begin with. I think it takes so many years of in-depth study to even understand most of it, it's not one of those start-to-finish books. And I agree...really? Twilight? I mean, yea, I loved it, but i'm not sure if it's gonna make the list in 10, 20, 50 or 100 years from now!
I'm diggin this list. Not only for the variety of genres, but for the easy reads mixed with the thought-provokers. You may have challenged me here. :)
Becky
This is a great list! I've done this kind of thing myself - created the list, not actually finished it. In case you want to borrow and not purchase I have 8, 9, 16, 73, 74 and 75.
Happy reading!
P.S. Should we expect reviews on each of these?!?! :-)
I know it sounds a little crazy, but I'm actually going to go to the LIBRARY tomorrow and start checking them out. I haven't checked out a book in a very long time...at least since jr. high. Unless I find them for dirt cheap (like under $5), I'm going to hit up the library.
Woohoo!
thanks so much for sharing this list! i think it's awesome. totally inspiring me to start reading again. i'm a teacher so during the school year it's pretty much textbooks only. but now i have the summer to read for fun again! i'll have to start in on some of these
I must recommend you read 'The Giver' which is number 15. I read this while my daughter read it for school so I could help her study. I LOVED IT!!! I read it in a couple of hours. Two others that I must recommend are #59 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and # 67 The Giving Tree. Your daughters will love the last one some day.
Have fun.
yea, I think I will write a little review of the books as I go. Might be fun, might make my readership take a dive right down the toilet as well! haha! We'll see!
L
I have the Glass Castle. You can borrow it to read. I loved it!
I never comment, but saw on your list that you're planning to read Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. Love, Love, LOVED it...even if the beginning is a bit slow. Stick with it. It's one of my favorite love stories. Good luck with your list!
I was following the BBC Big Reads list with a friend for awhile. I recommend that you at least check it out. We skipped around a bit, and I stopped with Catch-22, b/c it was a little too crazed for the kind of reading I wanted at the time.
I happened upon a book that I picked up called "Invitation to the Classics" by Cowan and Guiness, which explains about the author of the featured works, and also the role that the work played in history. So I have allowed this to guide some of the classics I read. I always looked into the life of the author before reading anyway.
I love to read, also.
...If you look at the Bible as a collection of books, some very short, then it does not seem so intimidating. It has been such an influential part of who we are as people, that that alone makes it a good read. I highly recommend Matthew first. I personally love the OTestament; some awesome stories.
I've done the research. My dad was a pastor, I went to private school until High School. Its not that I think it's intimidating, I just think it's not the kind of book to be read through like a novel. It would take a lifetime to really understand what you were reading, in my opinion. It's just in a different league than the other books.
I'm loving this list. I have been contemplating lately how much I have drifted from reading regularly (have sadly replaced it completely with online "reading").
I think I am going to use this list as a guideline to get started.
Thanks!
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