Perfectly okay with posting this list on a Saturday night.

[grammargirl]

Stolen from a couple people. Bold for the ones I've read, italics for the ones I've tried to read, stars next to my top ten.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen [Elizabeth Bennet is my hero]
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling* [Boy howdy!]
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee* [Fun fact: my soon-to-be company published a reissue of this, one of my favorite books from childhood]
6. Bible [Like sternel:Took a class. Am not that devoted.]
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte* [Emily's my favorite Bronte]
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens [My favorite Dickens.]
11. Little Women, Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22, Joseph Heller [I know, I'm ashamed. One of these days I'll finish it, I swear...]
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare, William Shakespeare [I've read a lot of 'em, but nowhere near all.]
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger [Liked it. Like Franny and Zooey a lot more, clearly.]
19. The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy [All 49372 pages of Russian aristocratic goodness, baby.]
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams* [I've read this a completely absurd number of times.]
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [Subway reading my first few months in New York.]
28. Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll [One of the books I reread over and over again and post-it flagged to death while writing my honors thesis.]
30. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy [Read it my freshman year of college, for fun, because I had waaaaaaay too much time on my hands.]
32. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia, C.S Lewis
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.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, A A Milne*
41. Animal Farm, George Orwell [Back in, like, 7th or 8th grade. I should really reread it now that I know what it's about]
42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown [Not even if you paid me.]
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 [Somehow I've only read the alliterative Austens]
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikrem 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 [One of these days.]
61. Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
62. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov* [The first paragraph of this book gives me shivers. Also contains my favorite parenthetical qualifier of all time.]
63. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones, Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas [It's on the list.]
66. On the Road, Jack Kerouac [I know it's all famous and revered and everything, but the misogyny makes me absolutely insane.]
67. Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary, Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie [I saw the play performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company, does that count?]
70. Moby Dick, Herman Melville [Eventually.]
71. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens [Read it when I stage managed Oliver! in high school]
72. Dracula, Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett [Love!]
74. Notes from a Small Island, Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses, James Joyce [24 hour out-loud group reading, what? I loved my Joyce class.]
76. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath*
77. Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal, Emil Zola
79. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray [Never read any Thackery. Should really get on that.]
80. Possession, A S Byatt* [OMG SO GOOD.]
81. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens [Huh... you know, I don't think I've actually read this. I've seen about 47 different movie adaptations, though.]
82. Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert [Not as sexy as I was led to believe.]
86. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White [Read it to some very bored 4th graders last year.]
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Alborn [I am in wholehearted agreement with sternel here: No. Just...no.]
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection, Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad [I still remember the paper I wrote about this my senior year. It was fantastic. I wish I still had a copy.]
92. The Little Prince, Antoine De Saint-Exupery [In English AND French!]
93. The Wasp Factory, Iain Banks
94. Watership Down, Richard Adams [A grownup book about talking rabbits! What's not to love?]
95. A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole [I held a copy of this book hostage for several months last year. Much to my surprise, it worked.]
96. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers, Alexander Dumas [Also on the list.]
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare [Whiny bastard.]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl [I can't believe this is on the list and not Matilda or The BFG.]
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo [I've owned a copy of this for years. One of these days.]

Comments

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

Re: Les Miserables- get yourself the abridged version. The unabridged has a lot of historical/geographical type stuff that is as dull as toast points.

[grammargirl.livejournal.com]

I refuse to read abridged anything. Call me snobbish if you want, but I like my books the way the author wrote them.