Tonight I sat down with my husband to watch a movie called the Equalizer and in it Denzel's character talks about his wife working her way through the Top 100 Books to Read Before You Die list.....and I thought, what a great idea!
So, in an effort to expand my mind and improve myself, I thought I'd do the same. Finding a definitive list was hard, and the movie doesn't state a source (of course, it's a movie!) so I went hunting and finally settled on a list called "100 Novels Everyone Should Read" posted by the Telegraph in the UK. So, to begin, I'm posting the list so you can follow along with me - I'll blog at least once on every book (or at least try to!). Here we go:
1. Middlemarch by George Eliot
2. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
3. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
4. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
5. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
6. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
7. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
8. Disgrace by JM Coetzee
9. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
10. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cevantes
11. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
12. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
13. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
14. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
15. The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
16. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
17. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy
18. Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
19. The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
20. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
21. 1984 by George Orwell
22. A Passage to India by EM Forster
23. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
24. Ulysses by James Joyce
25. The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
26. Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
27. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
28. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
29, Life: A User's Manual by Georges Perec
30. Atonement by Ian McEwan
31. Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky
32. A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
33. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
34. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
35. Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
36. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
37. The Warden by Anthony Trollope
38. The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
39. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
40. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
41. The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
42. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
43. The Rabbit Books by John Updike
44. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
45. The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
46. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
47. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
48. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
49. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
50. Beloved by Toni Morrison
51. Underworld by Don DeLillo
52. The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
53. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
54. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
55. Austerlitz by WG Sebald
56. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
57. The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
58. The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolano
59. London Fields by Martin Amis
60. One HUndred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. My Name is Red by Orhan Pamuk
62. Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
63. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
64. The Cairo Trology by Naguib Mahfouz
65. Dr Zhivago by Boris Pastermak
66. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
67. The Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
68. Crash by JG Ballard
69. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
70. The Leopard by Guiseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
71. The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
72. Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
73. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
74. Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
75. Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
76. The Trial by Franz Kafka
77. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
78. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
79. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
80. Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
81. The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
82. The Stranger by Albert Camus
83. Germinal by Emile Zola
84. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
85. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
86. Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac
87. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
88. Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
89. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
90. Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
91. The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
92. Cold Comfort by Stella Gibbons
93. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carre
94. Midnight's children by Salman Rushdie
95. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
96. One Thousand and One Nights Anonymous
97. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
98. The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
99. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
100. The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
I am under no illusions that this won't be a monumental task, taking me years - however I feel like there are so many books that I should have read that I haven't, it's about time I change that! Also, the other rule I'm putting in place is that even if I have read it before I'm reading it again - I want to be able to blog on them anyways, and it's about really digesting the stories.... I've put in bold the few books that I already own, and these will be the "back ups" for when I haven't been to the library. I thought I might start with Pride and Prejudice, partially because its a favourite and partially because I have it readily available to start tonight :) I'll update on my progress every once in a while - feel free to copy my list and start your own literary adventures! Happy reading!!!
Til next time.....
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