I got an email today from Amazon telling me I have a $9.70 credit due to a class action settlement with some publishers and suggesting I may want to use that credit to purchase one of the 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime as determined by the readers at GoodReads. So I thought it would be cool to see which of those 100 books I’ve already read and why I read them (e.g., school, book club, pleasure). I’d also thought it would be interesting to note which ones I have never even heard about.
49 Books (surprised, I thought it would be higher), 11 via Book Club, 13 for School and 4 I’ve never heard of.
Personally, it annoys me that Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet made the list as I view these as plays, not books. I also don’t understand why Lord of the Rings is counted as one entry but The Hunger Games trilogy and Harry Potter among others get to be broken out by book. Furthermore, I don’t understand why The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe is its own entry and yet the complete Chronicles of Narnia is another entry. Oh well.
So here’s my list. Feel free to share yours or to indicate which books you believe are missing.
Books I’ve read are in teal. Books I’ve never heard of, maroon.
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Book Club)
- The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- 1984 by George Orwell
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Harry Potter, #1) by J.K. Rowling
- The Lord of the Rings (The Lord of the Rings, #1-3) by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (School)
- Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
- The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (School)
- Little Women (Little Women, #1) by Louisa May Alcott
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Animal Farm by George Orwell (School)
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (School)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (School)
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett (Book Club)
- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Chronicles of Narnia, #1) by C.S. Lewis
- The Hunger Games (The Hunger Games, #1) by Suzanne Collins
- The Book Thief by Markus Zusak (Goodreads Author)
- The Grapes of Wrath The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (Book Club)
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini (Book Club)
- Night (The Night Trilogy, #1) by Elie Wiesel (School)
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare (School)
- A Wrinkle in Time (Time, #1) by Madeleine L’Engle
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (School)
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare (School)
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Hitchhiker’s Guide, #1) by Douglas Adams
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (Author/Illustrator)
- Where the Sidewalk Ends by Shel Silverstein
- The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (Book Club)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, #7) by J.K. Rowling
- The Giver (The Giver #1) by Lois Lowry
- The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
- Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables, #1) by L.M. Montgomery
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare (School)
- The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Millennium, #1) by Stieg Larsson (Book Club)
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Holy Bible: King James Version by Anonymous
- The Color Purple by Alice Walker
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- East of Eden by John Steinbeck
- Outlander (Outlander, #1) by Diana Gabaldon
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- Alice in Wonderland (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, #1) by Lewis Carroll
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
- The Stand by Stephen King
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, #3) by J.K. Rowling
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Ender’s Game (The Ender Quintet, #1) by Orson Scott Card
- Watership Down by Richard Adams
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (School)
- Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden (Book Club)
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
- A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, #1) by George R.R. Martin
- The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
- Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge 1995-2000 by Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes, #3) by Arthur Conan Doyle
- Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6) by J.K. Rowling
- Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel (Book Club – still must read)
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne (School)
- The Pillars of the Earth (The Pillars of the Earth, #1) by Ken Follett
- The Chronicles of Narnia (Chronicles of Narnia, #1-7) by C.S. Lewis
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Charlie Bucket, #1) by Roald Dahl
- Catching Fire (The Hunger Games, #2) by Suzanne Collins
- The Princess Bride by William Goldman
- Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen (Book Club)
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (Book Club)
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
- The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
- The Odyssey by Homer
- The Good Earth (House of Earth, #1) by Pearl S. Buck
- Mockingjay (The Hunger Games, #3) by Suzanne Collins
- The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
- And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
- A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
- The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls (Book club)
- The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
- The Road by Cormac McCarthy
- The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (School)
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster
- Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (Book Club – still need to read)
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsburg