Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Just a Thought...



"In 1450 there were about 100 new books published. Last year, there were more than a million. A new book comes out every 30 sec. It would take 15 years just to read the titles of every book published. And you're going to watch TV tonight? Fair enough, I suppose..."

It's pouring this morning!  And with the rain, comes many evenings spent snuggled in bed with a good book and a cupa tea :)  Here's what's on my Fall reading list -- most are taken from the list of 100 books the BBC thinks you should read before you die.  A challege, eh BBC?

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchel
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
Howard's End - E.M. Forster
Sula - Toni Morrison
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut
A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle
Mystery and Manners - Flannery O'Conner
Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Froer
Mysteries of Pittsburg - Michael Chabon
The Passage - Justin Cronin
The Irresistible Henry House - Lisa Grunwald
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory - Peter Hessler
The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine - Michael Lewis
Millenium Trilogy - Steig Larson
Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War - Karl Marlantes
The Imperfectionist - Tom Rachman
The Immortal life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
Just Kids - Patti Smith
The Lonely Polygamist - Brady Udall
The Tenth Parallel - Eliza Griswold

And more to come... now -- where to begin?

3 comments:

  1. This looks like a GOOD list...might have to copy a few of these down for my list!

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  2. P.s. I recommend going through the Jane Austen's spread out between other books, but definitely ALL of them are great reads!

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  3. Ya I'm just picking and choosing from the list -- definitely not chronological! Right now, I'm trying to get through Lord of the Rings trilogy, but with KNITTING SEASON, I have a hard time disseminating my free time appropriately... I just want to knit all the time!

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