'Books you can't live without: The Top 100' according to The Guardian

Submitted by bbookworm on Sun, 12/28/2008 - 11:19
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  1. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
  2. The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien)--Seriously, I've tried to read these. I can't get past the first fifty pages. Too many characters, too much history, too many places, etc. I don't like to work this hard to figure out who is who and where they are going and why.
  3. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
  4. Harry Potter series (JK Rowling)
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
  6. The Bible--I've never just sat down and read all the way through, but I've read most of it.
  7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
  8. Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell)--I was paranoid for about a year after reading this.
  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 (William Shakespeare)--Who has honestly read EVERYTHING written by Olde Willie? I've read a lot more than most people. Can't I have partial credit? Please?
  15. Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier)
  16. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)--Love this book. I've read it three times. Which is why I was shocked that I can't read The Lord of the Rings.
  17. Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks)
  18. Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger)--loved this book
  19. The Time Traveler's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
  20. Middlemarch (George Eliot)--tbr
  21. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
  22. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald)--Great
  23. Bleak House (Charles Dickens)
  24. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy)--On the shelf, waiting for me to feel ambitious.
  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)--I have no idea how I've reached adulthood without reading this book.
  31. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy)--I'm through the first book. Someday, I'll finish the rest.
  32. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens)--Reading this was like running a marathon. Well, what I imagine running a marathon would be like. I'm a reader, not a runner.
  33. Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis)--Really liked these as a child and am disappointed that they turned them into films.
  34. Emma (Jane Austen)
  35. Persuasion (Jane Austen)--Loved it.
  36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (CS Lewis)
  37. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
  38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin (Louis de Bernières)
  39. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)--So excellent, so beautiful.
  40. Winnie the Pooh (AA Milne)
  41. Animal Farm (George Orwell)
  42. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)--I don't get why this book was such a big deal (or why it is on this list). From a technical standpoint, it isn't a very well written novel. And there was the allegation that it was plagiarized material. Proof that popularity has nothing to do with quality or ethics. And I don't get why people were offended by the story. It is a novel, not a treatise on religious history. I will say this, media savvy marketers were certainly successful in whipping people into a book-buying, movie-watching frenzy.
  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)--in my to-be-read pile
  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)--in my to-be-read pile
  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)--This is one of those books that is really great and really depressing. I'm glad I read it on my own rather than as part of a high school or college curriculum.
  77. Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome)
  78. Germinal (Emile Zola)
  79. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray)
  80. Possession (AS Byatt)--Half way through and I just can't seem to stay engaged long enough to finish it. I think the movie distracted me.
  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)--half way through and I got bored
  86. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
  87. Charlotte's Web (EB White)
  88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Alborn)
  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)--What about Matilda, the Witches, the BFG, Danny the Champion of the World, George's Marvelous Medicine? They are all incredible books that I adored as a child. Memorable must-reads, every one.
  100. Les Misérables (Victor Hugo)
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'Books you can't live without: The Top 100' according to The Guardian
Belladonna01/10/2009

Ha! Fun reading your sidenotes! I agree with you on most of them. Popularity most certainly does not translate to quality in all cases. I personally liked Angels & Demons better than The Da Vinci Code. We'll soon see what they do to that movie...
I certainly haven't read all of Shakespeare and don't know anyone who has. I do recommend finishing Anna Karenina though - I enjoyed it:) Good luck!