Oh, these memes
The set-up: supposedly these are the 100 "least read" popular books, or something like that. I don't know. Just, if you want to do this meme, BOLD the titles you've read; ITALICIZE those you intend to read; and UNDERLINE those 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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -- I've read a lot of it, and I guess I'd read it all. Maybe. But Revelations annoys me.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -- I only read this (and Jane Eyre) because I was working in "stack control" at the Northwestern University Library during holidays in high school, and I used to read in the stacks instead of shelving. I also read all of the back numbers of The Socialist Register that way, and probably liked it more than both of those romantic novels.
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 -- well, I've read everything but... I don't know -- the early blood and guts ones, like Titus Andronicus.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger -- I thought this book was stupid when I read it in high school
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -- MAYBE I'll read this at some point
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 -- I loved the miniseries, but I don't like 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 -- these, yes, despite my anti-religious scruples. Also the even more horribly Christian sci-fi trilogy Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -- this was really, really good. Mostly I don't get why they include some contemporary novels (and I haven't read many of them). But this is excellent and I am looking forward to the next one, when it's in paperback, which should be soon. I think it's called A Thousand Splendid Suns
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
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -- I'm tempted to read this... and also other more low-brow fiction from the 19th c.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -- I read this book first when I was ten and my father had taken me TO Prince Edward Island and her homestead, and bought me the book in the gift shop. I've read everything she's written (always excepting whatever magazine fiction hasn't yet been forced between paperback covers to make a buck).
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
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -- I actually liked this. I sometimes consider rereading it.
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 -- not my favorite, of his, by a long chalk.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -- This was the only novel in French that I read, completely, while living in Paris. Well, in Malakoff, which is just south of Paris -- part of the peripherie. I liked it, but I hate French contemporary fiction. I spent much of my paycheck, that year, at W. H. Smith buying virtually ANYTHING written in English.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding This is an enjoyable book. What!?! I liked the movie, too.
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 -- I've read all her YAF, and am on the brink of reading them to my nieces, great excitement! I've shown them the movies (the most recent ones) already.
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 -- loved it. Have loved all of her intense, intricate novels about dysfunctional English families... love that she and Margaret Drabble (whose novels I've never read) are sisters who, according to gossip, don't like each other.
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 -- only exemplar of whatever this literary school is, that I've read. Didn't like it. Oh -- well... Les Miserables... that's not the same sort of naturalism, is it? I liked that fine.
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White -- I've read all of his children's books
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -- still love these and reread them
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery -- I HATED this book. Hated it. Much preferred L'Etranger by Camus, and read them both -- oh, and also Sartre's Les Jeux Sont Faits and preferred THAT bleakness to Le Petit Prince and its smarmy faux innocence...
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
You know what I sort of like about myself? There are only four books that I haven't read on this list THAT I INTEND TO READ. Ha. Basically I only read what I want to, and I wanted to read the ones I read, and I don't care about the rest.