Another book list. Yes, I know, some parts of the blogosphere have been buzzing about book lists and who should read what. I don't think I need to go over those lists, but I will mention this one: the books everyone should read before they die. The list was compiled by a group of librarians in Great Britain. As usual, I haven't read all the ones on the list but I will put in bold the ones I have read.
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird tops the chart. Have you read it? I haven't, but I guess I'll have to now.
The rest:
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quite on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn
I'm surprised that these aren't on the list:
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (or any other Gothic horror-type novel, such as The Phantom of the Opera or Dracula)
Any others you think should have been included?
My wife and I went so far as to name our daughter Harper Lee after the To Kill a Mockingbird author. Primarily, we liked the name. But it's also a darned good book. (My wife got dibs on our daughter's name. Our boy got tagged with "Lincoln" on account of my enthusiasm for history.)
ReplyDeleteTess of the D'oubervilles (Sp?) is excellente...
ReplyDeleteLeah: Whassup??!?? Glad to see you leaving comments here. I've left a ton on your site but you never seem to have time to respond to them.... Ah, well.
ReplyDeleteDoug: So you didn't want to name your son Atticus Finch Masson, huh?
That would have been cool.
Mockingbird is a great book. I finally read it just a couple summers ago. I also recently read The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli. It is ancient, but still around and is worth the read. Some things in politics never change.
ReplyDeleteThere are a few books that I am afraid to read, and "Mockingbird" is one of those. I'm afraid because it is one of those books that have such a huge hype ("You've GOT to read this!") that I'm worried that if I read it, I'll be like, "Huh, what's the big deal?" I'm sure I'll read it eventually. Another book like that is by Harper Lee's friend Truman Capote - "In Cold Blood."
ReplyDelete