I’ve been tagged by AcmeGirl for a book list meme. Fun!
So, I’m putting the one’s I’ve read in bold, the one’s I’ve read part of in italics, the ones I love in another color, and the rest are left alone. My classical readings aren’t really that many – mostly just stuff I read in/for school. As an engineering student, I didn’t read nearly as many classic works of fiction as many of my peers. I did read a lot of philosophy and nonfiction though (and of course science and math textbooks…), and I’ve always loved memoirs. None of those are on this list…
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien - I love fantasy novels!
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible – I’ve read parts of it, as well as parts of the Koran. But I haven’t read the whole thing.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – quite enjoyed it
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 – Although I’ve of course read many of his works.
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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams - even wrote about it in a college essay!
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 – loved the movie, should get to the book someday
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – I’ve got two kids, what do you expect?
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 Meany – 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 - quite good!
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding - I’ll always remember the class exercises we did and how I came to believe that some type of government is necessary, good, and inevitable. I have a few libertarian friends and I sometimes wonder if they’ve ever read this book…
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – the trilogy, baby!
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 - I tend to have a really open mind, and it wasn’t obvious to me at first that this was a dystopia. I also read Island, which I liked even more than BNW.
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 – I actually cry at the end. Every. Time.
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – but i did read her other book, Lucky, a memoir of her rape.
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – have it, intend to read it, feel a special connection to Kerouac since tales say he spent much of his time at the beloved undergrad hangout of my alma mater.
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 – I think I’ve read it…?
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – I tried…
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – hope to read this one some day!
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 – must get to this one
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 - own it, love mysteries, but haven’t read it yet.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
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
, came out recently. She’s set up a 
. It will be released later this year and looks like a promising collection of essays about combining motherhood and academia. This book also has an accompanying blog at 
, by Philip Pullman (OK, not that recent…but within the last 6 months)
, by J. R. R. Tolkien
, by Alexandra Robbins
, by Maggi McCormick Gordon
, by Linley Erin Hall (currently reading this one)
, by 
, to be helpful. It includes a section on diet and exercise, with recommendations for a diet and activities that focus on the nutrients and muscles that are needed for a healthy pregnancy.
today, which stars Julianne Moore as a 1950’s housewife who raises 10 children with an alcoholic husband who has abusive tendencies. She manages to keep the family going by continually entering, and winning, many contests to write advertising slogans for various products. I really loved the movie, and I think it will touch a lot of people; I want to share it with my mom, and my aunt, and my grandma. From what I’ve heard, it sounds like there are a good amount of similarities between the lives of the family portrayed in this movie (which is based on the memoir of Terry Ryan, one of the 10 children) and the lives of my mom and her siblings and my grandma and grandpa. It portrays very realistically the pressures that the 1950s consumer society, where people had many pressures to fill specific gender roles, put on both women and men. Although for time and generation this movie is much closer to my mom and grandma, I also saw bits of myself in the character of Tuff, the daughter who wrote 
that the movie was based on. I recommend checking out the movie, and I myself intend to read the book as soon as I can!
just yet. We picked up the book on Friday night at the Lincoln Center Barnes and Noble, which turned out to be a fun experience but not the raucous party that it sounds like they had over at the Columbus Circle Borders, where there was a “Grand Hallows Ball.”
came out two summers ago, I had been meaning to reread the books before reading the seventh. My husband had not read 5 or 6 until a few months ago, and he read them all so fast that he finished two months before the new book was coming out. So I decided to wait until a little bit closer to start reading them, anticipating that I would read them quickly. But the summer wore on and time snuck up on me, and before I knew it was two weeks until the book release and I hadn’t started. So I began, a little under two weeks ago, to reread them beginning with the first. I managed to read 1, 2, and 3 in their entirety, and then for book 4 I skimmed it and read completely the beginning and especially the end. Then I read book 5 in its entirety, which I just finished last night – I was reading book 5 while we waited in the line to purchase book 7 at midnight. Now I am on book 6, and my husband is about halfway through book 7. I’m trying to finish book 6 just after he finishes the last one so that I can pick it up right away to read it. The suspense is difficult as we are both so excited and he wants to talk about the story with me, but my memory of book 6 is only vague and buying two copies just so we could read it at the same time seemed silly considering we are rather low on money right now. I am sure I will have finished book 7 by the end of this week, and I can’t wait!
