Well Read

One of my guilty pleasures is to curl up with a good book and spend the day reading. Nothing, to me, could be more relaxing. I am such an avid reader that I frequently devour two or three books at the same time.

About a year ago, one of my dear friends convinced me to join her book club. This new endeavor has only served to fuel my obsession. If a storyline grabs my attention, I have been known to stay up half the night, reading feverishly, just to see how it ends.

My hubby would probably say that I have a problem. I, however, am not convinced. I can quit if I want to. Really, I can.

That brings me to the point of this post. As I was scanning some blogs the other night, I noticed that a friend had written a post about The Big Read (a tag that is circulating on Facebook). I believe it's a spin on The Big Read initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts.

I, like my friend, do not think this is an exhaustive list. If I was writing my own "Well Read" list, there would me numerous additions/removals to the books you will see listed below. Books like Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Pilgrim's Progress, Fahrenheit 451, The Grapes of Wrath, The Iliad & The Odyssey, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Call of the Wild... just to name a few.

If you want to play along, simply copy the list below, remove my "yes and no" and add your own. I still can't believe how many I had read!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Yes
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Yes
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Yes
4 Harry Potter series - No, I haven't cracked a single cover.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes. It's my favorite book ever.
6 The Bible – Yes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Yes
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - No
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Yes
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – Yes
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Yes
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Yes
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - Yes
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Yes
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - Yes
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Yes
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Yes
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - Yes
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Yes
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Yes
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Yes
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Yes
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Yes, but I hated every minute of it.
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - Yes
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Yes
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - Yes
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Yes
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - Yes
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Yes
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Yes
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - Yes
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Yes
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Yes
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - Yes
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Yes
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - No
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - Yes
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - Yes
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - Yes
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Yes
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - Yes
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Yes
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Yes
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - Yes
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - No
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Yes
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - Yes
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - Yes
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - No
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Yes
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Yes
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Yes
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - Yes
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - Yes
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - Yes
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - Yes
80 Possession - AS Byatt - Yes
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens – Yes
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - Yes
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - Yes
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - Yes
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - Yes
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - Yes
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - Yes
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - Yes
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Yes
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Yes

In addition to the list on the official Big Read website, you can find other great books to read at 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, and the Modern Library's 100 Best.