Hooked On Phonics, Lily Style

I'm of the opinion that in order to have a fantastic, more rewarding life, you've got to read.  Don't they say that libraries are universities for people who cannot attend university?  Around Christmastime, one of my Facebook acquaintances wrote a post about how the BBC has a list of the 100 books it thinks that everyone ought to read but figures most people have only read about 6 of them.  When I read that post, I decided right then and there, that I would plow my way through that list.  I checked off the titles I'd already read and it came to 18 books.  Here is the list.  The titles I've read have a star next to them:

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

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations* - Charles Dickens (I just finished this last Saturday)

11 Little Women* - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

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

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 - A.A. 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 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

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 Inferno - Dante

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I'm currently reading this)

80 Possession* - AS Byatt (awesome, awesome, AWESOME book!!!)

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 (one of my favorites)

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web* - E.B. White

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

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

I must confess that I'm hugely enjoying this process.  In the past, I'd always shied away from English Literature, particularly Charles Dickens, with the excuse that it was much too hard, slow-going and boring.  Naturally, I was bored by Great Expectations at the age of 14, due to the thorough evisceration by my 9th grade English teacher.  When I picked it up again last week, I was hooked instantly, and couldn't put it down.  It doesn't help that we live in a bodice-ripper/tabloid society.  Not that there's anything wrong with bodice-rippers, but too many of them do tend to addle the brain.  An excellent life, a superior existence, cries out for "the meat and drink" of good books (thanks to Sally Beauman for that partial quote).  Bon Appetit!