What a Life!

Since I became interested in homeschooling Ben, my love of reading has been rekindled. I must confess, I haven’t gotten very far. The books I’ve read since last summer could probably be counted on one hand. But considering I haven’t done hardly any pleasure reading since I Ben was born, it’s progress at least.

Here is a book list that I copied from And She Knits Too!. Stephannie says that, according to The Big Read, most adults have only read six books from this list. I’ve marked the ones I’ve read…and haven’t read. Feel free to copy the list and mark it up for yourself. My count is 22 out of 100. Better than six…but I intend to read a lot more of them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – yes
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – no
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – yes
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – no
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – no
6 The Bible – yes
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – yes
8 1984 – George Orwell – yes
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – no
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – yes
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – no
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – no
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – no
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – no, just the ones I had to read in school (and didn’t really enjoy)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – no
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – no
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks – yes
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – no
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – no
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot- no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – yes, more than once
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – no
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – no
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy – no
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – no
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – no
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky – no
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – no
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – no
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – no
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – no
33 The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – no
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – no
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – yes
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – no
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – no
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – no
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell -yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – no
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – yes
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – no
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – no
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – no
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood – no
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – no
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – no
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – no
52 Dune – Frank Herbert- no
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – no
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – no
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – no
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – no
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – yes
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – no
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon – no
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – no
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – no
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – no
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – yes
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – no
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – no
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – yes
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – no
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – yes
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – no
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – no
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – no
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – no
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – no
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – no
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – no
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – no
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – no
80 Possession – AS Byatt- no
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – no
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – no
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – no
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – no
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – no
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – no
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – no
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – no
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – no
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupe – no
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – no
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – no
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – no
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – no
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – no
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – no
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – no
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – yes