EW Top 100 Novels of All Time

Ah, you gotta love it when magazines put out their 'top 100' lists of various categories. This week EW featured listings for the 'top 100 of all time' in movies, books, albums, etc.

You know me....I had to see what was featured as the top 100 novels of all time. I thought it would be fun to italicize the novels on the list that I have read.

1. Anna Karenina By Leo Tolstoy
2. The Great Gatsby By F. Scott Fitzgerald
3. Pride and Prejudice By Jane Austen
4. Great Expectations By Charles Dickens
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. My Antonia By Willa Cather
7. The Harry Potter series By J.K. Rowling
8. The Rabbit quartet By John Updike
9. Beloved By Toni Morrison
10. Charlotte's Web By E.B. White
11. Mrs. Dalloway By Virginia Woolf
12. The Sound and the Fury By William Faulkner
13. To Kill a Mockingbird By Harper Lee
14. Crime and Punishment By Fyodor Dostoevsky
15. Ragtime By E.L. Doctorow
16. Jane Eyre By Charlotte Bronte
17. The Road By Cormac McCarthy
18. Moby-Dick By Herman Melville
19. Lolita By Vladimir Nabokov
20. Lonesome Dove By Larry McMurtry
21. An American Tragedy By Theodore Dreiser
22. Wuthering Heights By Emily Bronte
23. The Brothers Karamazov By Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man By James Joyce
25. Bleak House By Charles Dickens
26. Invisible Man By Ralph Ellison
27. A Wrinkle in Time By Madeleine L'Engle
28. War and Peace By Leo Tolstoy
29. The Handmaid's Tale By Margaret Atwood
30. Native Son By Richard Wright
31. Blindness By Jose Saramago
32. The Catcher in the Rye By J.D. Salinger
33. Maus By Art Spiegelman
34. The World According to Garp By John Irving
35. A Personal Matter By Kenzaburo Oe
36. Atlas Shrugged By Ayn Rand
37. The Sun Also Rises By Ernest Hemingway
38. The Regeneration trilogy By Pat Barker
39. Middlesex By Jeffrey Eugenides
40. A Suitable Boy By Vikram Seth
41. Go Tell It on The Mountain By James Baldwin
42. The Stand By Stephen King
43. A Confederacy of Dunces By John Kennedy Toole
44. His Dark Materials By Philip Pullman – only read first book in series
45. The Color Purple By Alice Walker
46. The Age of Innocence By Edith Wharton
47. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle By Haruki Murakami
48. The Talented Mr. Ripley By Patricia Highsmith
49. Ender's Game By Orson Scott Card
50. Snow By Orhan Pamuk
51. The Corrections By Jonathan Franzen
52. Song of Solomon By Toni Morrison
53. Gone With the Wind By Margaret Mitchell
54. Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk By Ben Fountain
55. A Fine Balance By Rohinton Mistry
56. Sophie's Choice By William Styron
57. The Children of Men By P.D. James
58. Midnight's Children By Salman Rushdie
59. Dracula By Bram Stoker
60. Their Eyes Were Watching God By Zora Neale Hurston
61. Love in the Time of Cholera By Gabriel Garcia Marquez
62. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn By Mark Twain
63. Portnoy's Complaint By Philip Roth
64. Infinite Jest By David Foster Wallace
65. Herzog By Saul Bellow
66. Howards End By E.M. Forster
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay By Michael Chabon
68. Middlemarch By George Eliot
69. Money By Martin Amis
70. Neuromancer By William Gibson
71. The Hobbit By J.R.R. Tolkien
72. The Remains of the Day By Kazuo Ishiguro
73. The Spy Who Came in From the Cold By John le Carre
74. Cold Mountain By Charles Frazier
75. Madame Bovary By Gustave Flaubert
76. The Golden Notebook By Doris Lessing
77. Tom Jones By Henry Fielding
78. A House for Mr. Biswas By V.S. Naipaul
79. Bring Up the Bodies By Hilary Mantel
80. Swann's Way By Marcel Proust
81. Frankenstein By Mary Shelley
82. Disgrace By J.M. Coetzee
83. The Stone Diaries By Carol Shields
84. Clockers By Richard Price
85. Catch-22 By James Heller
86. A Home at the End of the World By Michael Cunningham
87. White Teeth By Zadie Smith
88. The Bonfire of the Vanities By Tom Wolfe
89. Tristram Shandy By Laurence Sterne
90. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter By Carson McCullers
91. The Leopard By Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
92. The Glass Bead Game By Hermann Hesse
93. Bastard Out of Carolina By Dorothy Allison
94. The Moonstone By Wilkie Collins
95. The Poisonwood Bible By Barbara Kingsolver
96. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler By Italo Calvino
97. The Big Sleep By Raymond Chandler
98. Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret By Judy Blume
99. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy By Douglas Adams
100. The Joy Luck Club By Amy Tan

So what do you think? I have never read Anna Karenina completely. I attempted to read the gargantuan novel in high school but could never get through the first couple of chapters. Do I think it should have been given the number 1 spot? Hmm......I would say no.....I could think of more influential novels in the grand scheme of things than that one, but it does deserve to be on the list.

The Great Gatsby as number 2????? That one is a puzzler for me. I didn't enjoy the novel in high school. I blame the fact that we analyzed the book to an inch of its life.........and I don't find that a good way to enjoy a book. I don't think my classmates enjoyed it either......

Pride and Prejudice as number 3? I can see it in the top ten novels, but I have my misgivings about its placement. If Jane Austen wasn't so popular during the last couple of years I don't think it would have been placed as number 3.

I was glad to see several of Charles Dickens' works on the list, but was mystified as to why David Copperfield wasn't on the list.....???

Speaking of novels not on the list, why weren't these on the list:

1) Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles
2) Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
3) Louisa May Alcott's Little Women

sigh............I could keep going...........

As you can tell, a lot of my italicized books are 19th century novels............sorry..........*cough cough*......I will admit that I'm more partial to that century than any other when it comes to novels.

What do you guys think of the top 100 novels of all time? Does it meet your approval? What novels do you think should have been on the list?   Until next time ^____^

Top 100 Books List *updated*

My aunt was asking me about this list that I had posted back in July 2008. I thought I'd re-post the list with the books that I've read.

I've read 44 books on this list; in July 2008, I had read 36 of these books.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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
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 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 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 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
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

Don't be an average adult!! Read more than 6 books on the list! You won't regret it. I recommend any of books by the following authors: Louisa M. Alcott, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, or Thomas Hardy.

Happy reading and/or stitching ;)

Only 6 books!?!?!?! My heart breaks...

I saw this list posted on Jane Austen's World blog. According to the blog she got it from, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.

I've read 36 books on this list. Though I have to agree with Jane Austen's World; this list is by no means complete in any sense of word because a great many more classic titles that I have read are not on this list. Why is Bridget Jones' Diary on the list?!?!? And where is The Scarlett Letter or The Crucible?!?!? At least give me more than just one book by Lucy M. Montgomery!! O____o"

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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
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 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 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 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
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


LOL Apparently my shortcut key skills are terrible because I can't underline or strike a line through anything, at least on blogger. Needless to say, I didn't hate any of the books I read. I didn't really particularly like Bridget Jones' Diary or Lord of the Flies, but I didn't hate them. I liked to read in school so I never hated any of the books we were given. If something wasn't my style, I just didn't read it again. I mean who would reread Lord of the Flies?!? It was quite a disturbing book!

My all-time favorites were anything written by Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Louisa M. Alcott, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, who only has one book on the list by the way!!

Don't be an average adult!! Read more than 6 books on the list! You won't regret it. I recommend any of books by the following authors: Louisa M. Alcott, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Charles Dickens, Alexandre Dumas, or Thomas Hardy.

Have a great weekend. Happy reading and/or stitching ;)