Posted by Woo hoo! I’ve been tagged with a book meme!
The rules: boldface the books on this list that you’ve read, and italicize books you started but never finished.
Okay. . .
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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee~
6 The Bible – I think I’ve read over 75% of this, so I’m going with it. The begats don’t count.
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte~
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – 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
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Oh, come on. How many people have read “Two Gentlemen of Verona?”
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks – dude, I’ve never even heard of this!
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~
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany – 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
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
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~
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
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville~
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens~
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
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
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – didn’t manage the whole collection – about 50% at most.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad~
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
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~
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
That’s just over half the list that I’ve completed.
According to Scibling Chad, there’s a somewhat doubtful claim that the average American has read only 6 of these books! I find that hard to believe, but who knows.
A clever monkey makes the excellent point, ” A lot of this stuff is canon reading for the educational years. Not so anymore perhaps?” Actually, not so much for me – I’ve tagged those books that I was required to read for a class (high school or college) with a tilda (~). Don’t ask why I read War and Peace when I wasn’t required to do so. . . I’m a fruit loop, okay? But my point is, I read very few of these for class – and I have a BA in English. These just weren’t the books we happened to be assigned!
A further aspect of the original meme was placing an asterisk by those books you enjoyed. . . I decided not to, because enjoying a book is not the same as learning from a book or admiring a book. I can detest the book itself, but value the experience of slogging through it, or respect it as a creative object. My favorite book, Pride and Prejudice, tops the list anyway. 
Now, whom shall I torture with this meme? I’m going to go drop a few tags in the blogosphere. . . put your lists on your blogs or in the comments here!
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