The World Book Night Reading List

Hi Everyone!

I found a new book list! You know how I love these things; they are a great inspiration for future reading. I stumbled upon this list when I followed a link in twitter posted by Neil Gaiman (@neilhimself on twitter).  He was asked to contribute a list of his top-ten books of all time for the 2012 World Book Night event.  What I found was a great ever-evolving list of books that readers of all walks of life love.

The list:  http://worldbooknight.org/your-books/the-wbn-top-100-books

As of this writing, I've read twenty-nine of the books on the list with ten of them being read during this project. I've read six of the top-ten, and eight of the top-twelve. However, this number might change as more people weigh in with their favorites. It is important to note that this list is again UK centric as that is where the organizer is based so there is a lot of overlap with the "BBC" list I posted earlier. 

The project associated with the list is interesting.  From the website:

The first World Book Night was held in the UK in the spring of 2011 and saw 20,000 people give away 1 million specially printed books - 40,000 copies of 25 brilliant titles.

This site exists in order to celebrate books and to connect readers with one another. You can learn more about World Book Night itself, the 2011 books and authors, and connect with other passionate readers.

And most importantly, you can help us shape World Book Night 2012 by telling us your ten favourite books - the books you most love to read, give and share - to give them a chance to be featured in next year's list. Simply sign up or login and tell us what books really matter to you.

Each copy of the book given out is a special edition.  The publishers ask that anyone who reads one of these special versions to send them a note so they can see how the books travel throughout their life.  It would be interesting to know if a project like this could take off in the US.

Anyway, take a gander and chime in if you feel like it.  I'm still compiling my top-ten books.  I will post in the comments when my list is complete.  If you have a list, please share it with me!

The Time Magazine 100 Best Novels

Ok, I found another book list and I thought it was a good one to go along side the BBC list.  This one is set up a bit different.  Here is a quote by the editor on what the selection criteria was:

This week we introduce our TIME 100 list of the best novels on TIME.com and I expect the debates will be just as lively. There were only two ground rules. As with our film list, we picked 1923--when TIME began publishing--as our starting point. And we focused on books written in English. That's why there is no Ulysses (published in 1922) or One Hundred Years of Solitude (originally written in Spanish).

This list is nice as it provides links to a simple description of the novel

 I've colored the ones I've read with a blue font; so far, I've read thirteen on this list

A - B

• The Adventures of Augie March (1953), by Saul Bellow
• All the King's Men (1946), by Robert Penn Warren
• American Pastoral (1997), by Philip Roth
• An American Tragedy (1925), by Theodore Dreiser
• Animal Farm (1946), by George Orwell
• Appointment in Samarra (1934), by John O'Hara
• Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret(1970), by Judy Blume
• The Assistant (1957), by Bernard Malamud
• At Swim-Two-Birds (1938), by Flann O'Brien
• Atonement (2002), by Ian McEwan
• Beloved (1987), by Toni Morrison
• The Berlin Stories (1946), by Christopher Isherwood
• The Big Sleep (1939), by Raymond Chandler
• The Blind Assassin (2000), by Margaret Atwood
• Blood Meridian (1986), by Cormac McCarthy
• Brideshead Revisited (1946), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1927), by Thornton Wilder

C - D

• Call It Sleep (1935), by Henry Roth
• Catch-22 (1961), by Joseph Heller
• The Catcher in the Rye (1951), by J.D. Salinger
• A Clockwork Orange (1963), by Anthony Burgess
• The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), by William Styron
• The Corrections (2001), by Jonathan Franzen
• The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), by Thomas Pynchon
• A Dance to the Music of Time (1951), by Anthony Powell
• The Day of the Locust (1939), by Nathanael West
• Death Comes for the Archbishop (1927), by Willa Cather
• A Death in the Family (1958), by James Agee
• The Death of the Heart (1958), by Elizabeth Bowen
• Deliverance (1970), by James Dickey
• Dog Soldiers (1974), by Robert Stone

F - G

• Falconer (1977), by John Cheever
• The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), by John Fowles
• The Golden Notebook (1962), by Doris Lessing
• Go Tell it on the Mountain (1953), by James Baldwin
• Gone With the Wind (1936), by Margaret Mitchell
• The Grapes of Wrath (1939), by John Steinbeck
• Gravity's Rainbow (1973), by Thomas Pynchon
• The Great Gatsby (1925), by F. Scott Fitzgerald

H - I

• A Handful of Dust (1934), by Evelyn Waugh
• The Heart is A Lonely Hunter (1940), by Carson McCullers
• The Heart of the Matter (1948), by Graham Greene
• Herzog (1964), by Saul Bellow
• Housekeeping (1981), by Marilynne Robinson
• A House for Mr. Biswas (1962), by V.S. Naipaul
• I, Claudius (1934), by Robert Graves
• Infinite Jest (1996), by David Foster Wallace
• Invisible Man (1952), by Ralph Ellison

L - N

• Light in August (1932), by William Faulkner
• The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe(1950), by C.S. Lewis
• Lolita (1955), by Vladimir Nabokov
• Lord of the Flies (1955), by William Golding
• The Lord of the Rings (1954), by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Loving (1945), by Henry Green
• Lucky Jim (1954), by Kingsley Amis
• The Man Who Loved Children (1940), by Christina Stead
• Midnight's Children (1981), by Salman Rushdie
• Money (1984), by Martin Amis
• The Moviegoer (1961), by Walker Percy
• Mrs. Dalloway (1925), by Virginia Woolf
• Naked Lunch (1959), by William Burroughs
• Native Son (1940), by Richard Wright
• Neuromancer (1984), by William Gibson
• Never Let Me Go (2005), by Kazuo Ishiguro
• 1984 (1948), by George Orwell

O - R

• On the Road (1957), by Jack Kerouac
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962), by Ken Kesey
• The Painted Bird (1965), by Jerzy Kosinski
• Pale Fire (1962), by Vladimir Nabokov
• A Passage to India (1924), by E.M. Forster
• Play It As It Lays (1970), by Joan Didion
• Portnoy's Complaint (1969), by Philip Roth
• Possession (1990), by A.S. Byatt
• The Power and the Glory (1939), by Graham Greene
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961), by Muriel Spark
• Rabbit, Run (1960), by John Updike
• Ragtime (1975), by E.L. Doctorow
• The Recognitions (1955), by William Gaddis
• Red Harvest (1929), by Dashiell Hammett
• Revolutionary Road (1961), by Richard Yates

S - T

• The Sheltering Sky (1949), by Paul Bowles
• Slaughterhouse Five (1969), by Kurt Vonnegut
• Snow Crash (1992), by Neal Stephenson
• The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), by John Barth
• The Sound and the Fury (1929), by William Faulkner
• The Sportswriter (1986), by Richard Ford
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold(1964), by John le Carre
• The Sun Also Rises (1926), by Ernest Hemingway
• Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), by Zora Neale Hurston
• Things Fall Apart (1959), by Chinua Achebe
• To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), by Harper Lee
• To the Lighthouse (1927), by Virginia Woolf
• Tropic of Cancer (1934), by Henry Miller

U - W

• Ubik (1969), by Philip K. Dick
• Under the Net (1954), by Iris Murdoch
• Under the Volcano (1947), by Malcolm Lowry
• Watchmen (1986), by Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
• White Noise (1985), by Don DeLillo
• White Teeth (2000), by Zadie Smith
• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), by Jean Rhys

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1951793,00.html#ixzz1HlKU9QqO

The BBC Reading List

A friend of mine posted a list of 100 famous books of which the BBC thinks most people would have read only six. The list is very UK centric, but has spawned many great discussions amongst my family and friends.  

Here is the list in its full glory.  The bold titles with the 'X' are one which I have read.  I will try to keep this list current (Last updated 7/31/2012)

How many have you read?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible (The entire thing!)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X

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 X * my personal favorite...

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X 

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 X

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 X

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez X

44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 X

52 Dune - Frank Herbert X

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 X

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

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 X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X

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 X

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante

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 X

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 X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Eupery X

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 - Aleandre Dumas

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Grand Total I've read: 33