Mommy Brain

Magistramater pointed me to this list at The Telegraph. People in Britain were asked to name the ten books they could not live without, and their answers were compiled into this list of the Top 100. So, how many have you read? I’ve read the ones in bold and the ones in italic are ones I want to read. If there’s a star after it, then I own it. A question mark means I’ve never heard of it.

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 (planning to re-read soon)

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 * (I’ve read many of them, but not all – yet.)

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 * (planning to re-read the “trilogy” this year)

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 – ICK!

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 * (reading right now)

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 (I tried reading this to the kids, and none of us liked it enough to finish.)

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 Alborn

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

How many have you read? Can you fill in some of my question marks?