Struck = read, italicised = meaning to

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – J.K. 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 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 – 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 Mitchel
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

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Wuthering Heights

I don’t get this book, I really don”t. Where is it going? What is it doing? Why does it exist and why is it so popular?

With Jane Eyre you could at least sort of see how Rochester was a romantic hero, dark, brooding, etc etc etc.

Heathcliff is just a massive, hairy, douchebag-y prick. Not a hero at all. He’s like, “I love my adopted sister but she’s married so I’m going to make her life difficult.” And then “I’m going to marry this girl and torture her. No, it’s not even revenge any more, but it’s a shitload of fun.”

Catherine Earnshaw (Heathcliff’s adopted sister) is a spoilt brat who doesn’t do anything except fly into tempers, ignore her husband, and being nasty to Heathcliff. Also she has a baby, or something.

Most of it is complicated family stuff and I’m really not interested. It reminds me of this show Mum watches called Brothers & Sisters, and literally every episode is like “oh but you can’t date him, we have a feud with that family” or “actually we have an unknown half-sister” or “oh god someone’s got brain cancer” or “we’re going to adopt kids!”

I got halfway through Wuthering Heights and gave up because it sucked. However it could be improved by zombies, but only maybe.

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Okay I know I keep saying I haven’t done any reading these holidays but this doesn’t count.
It was really interesting though. Cool. Kay bye.

Okay I know I keep saying I haven’t done any reading these holidays but this doesn’t count.

It was really interesting though. Cool. Kay bye.

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The Lost World - Arthur Conan Doyle

DINOSAURS

ADVENTURE

ROMANCE

READ IT TODAY

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The Picture of Dorian Gray

 is a wonderful wonderful book

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The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon

Well, I had to re-read it after reading Sherlock Holmes. I actually really enjoyed this. I read it years and years ago but I don’t think I really appreciated it completely. I guess now I’m identifying more with Christopher and I get all the Sherlock Holmes references.

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Frankenstein - Mary Shelley

It is really addictive! I really like her writing style and the book was extremely engaging.

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I finished Sherlock Holmes.

I’m going to repeat how much I hate the “I died but don’t worry I didn’t really” device that authors seem all too fond of. I mean I know it isn’t Doyle’s fault here; he really meant to kill Holmes, but it still ruins it a bit for me.

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Even more Sherlock Holmes

I really, really like the writing style Doyle employs. It’s elegant and simple and very attractive in an old-fashioned way. But it doesn’t bog you down, like some people think Jane Eyre does (actually I think Jane Eyre is also beautiful but it is definitely harder to read than Sherlock Holmes).

That 50 bucks I spent on the Complete Sherlock Holmes was the best 50 bucks spent ever.

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The Iliad - Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

I have to admit I’m like a tenth in and I am having difficulty. I don’t like the translation. Robert Fagles is not cool.

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