sure I'll go along...
Nov. 7th, 2025 08:44 pm"bold what you've read, italicize what you intend to read, and underline what you loved"
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (started it and hated it. I think I suffered all the way through book 1.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (pretty sure I read this and blocked it out.)
6 The Bible (way too much of it)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I have a vague feeling I read this in college but I don't remember)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most?)
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 (I just think of this guy as Hemmingway's friend lol)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I tried, alas)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I liked it a lot and it lives rent free inside my head but a lot of it also makes me uncomfortable because of the sarcasm, so not sure I can say I love it, but I did read it twice. I did carry a towel for a while. I did get excited when I turned 42. He has a book I much prefer called Last Chance to See.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (and Through the Looking Glass)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (foundational)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I couldn't finish it)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (I loved them at the time)
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
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (That fish swimming through the window scene)
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 (I want to read others by her but not this one.)
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
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 might have not finished it)
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 (so sad)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (boring)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (boring - maybe coming-of-age boy stories are dull for me)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (foundational)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I tried! I got part way! I felt like I read for an eternity and was still at the very beginning)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 The only thing I don't like about this is how it feeds the compulsive drive to over-give when one is already an over-giver and does not actually have resources to spend on lavishing others with gifts.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White Foundational. I love spiders always and forever. I have a porch spider at the new house and I am so in love with her.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (read one of them! Kinda fun I guess but again, very male oriented)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I feel like I've tried on recommendation and couldn't get into it? Maybe I should try again.)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (I hated this as an adolescent because of all the death, but I feel a lot better about it now. I sometimes dress as the Black Rabbit of Inle for Halloween.)
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 I love how "to be or not to be" is one of the least interesting moments in this play.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl Loved it so much I read the sequel. It was fun too!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Josh seemed too sad after this one.)
"All the world will be your enemy, Prince With A Thousand Enemies. And whenever they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you. Digger, listener, runner, Prince With A Swift Warning. Be cunning, and your people will never be destroyed." - Richard Adams, Watership Down