The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien Harry Potter series – To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden Animal Farm – George Orwell The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown Atonement – Ian McEwan The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold Dracula – Bram Stoker Twelve. Would be more, but some of those books I've started but never actually finished.
Yeah. I'm a Christian, so I had always grown up reading certain passages and chapters. One day a friend of mine challenged me to read the whole thing start to finish. After about a year of spending five minutes a day on it, I completed it.
Yeah, Leviticus is almost the same as a law book, but still kind of interesting. Revelation is the really interesting book.
I only have 10, but then English is not my first language and things like 'little prince' I read in French class. Others like faust, or huis clos etc should be on the list too... IMO. I find reading in the original language better than translated, even though it can be hard work. My first time attempting the hobbit I didn't understand half the words. Lucky i tried again later... Pity I don't know enough Greek for some of the more original (I know it's still a leap) bible passages. Translations have a way of (mis)interpreting the material.
Wow, I've read 34... didn't think I would have read so many... Well, kind of 35. Two books on that list were so boring I could only get halfway through... but together they make a whole book! Yay!
I had eight I think, there might be some that ive read in Swedish and I dont know the translated title. Kind of funny that the only Orwell book I have read was not one of the two on the list (Homage to Catalonia)
I've 35. But this list is a bit confusing. For example it has The Complete Works of Shakespeare and then lists Hamlet separately.
I Got 12 of them, I hate Jane Austen, she's overrated, especially in England. There's no Dostovjeskj, no Dante Alighieri, nothing from Balzac, Goethe...I think this list is very anglocentric. The Da Vinci code...bleah!
Fourteen, but hey I have a lot of years to get caught up. My top five: To Kill a Mockingbird, The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, Pride and Prejudice.
My husband hated the DaVinci Code. I didn't bother reading it. Most of the books on the list that I haven't read are because I have no intention of reading them. And I didn't necessarily like all the ones I did read. And where are Mark Twain and Jack London????
Actually I think it's a book to read for a writer, but as negative example: what NOT to do, the Da Vinci code is badly written, full with sterotypes (the professor in tweed, the lady in danger, cardboard villains...) factual errors due to lack of documentation (the smart car's fuel efficiency, wrong engines on a certain type of airplane), stupid plot devices (the message is written in english not because Brown is too lazy to write in another laguage, but because it was a "latin free language", that makes no sense because half of the vocabulary comes from a neolatin language like french) etc...etc... Angels & Demons is even worse, even a non native speaker like me can write in better english, so I'm feeling a little reassured by Brown's success...
Only 13, I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself, though I have SEEN a lot of the movie/tv adaptions of a lot of the books, and some I own but haven't actually read. 84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro<--- when I read this I wanted to gnaw off my own leg to stave off the boredom. I hated it.
I happen to love both the Davinci Code and Angels and Demons... maybe not the best writing in the world, but darned if I wasn't entertained the whole way through. To each their own, though.
Spoiler 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien 4 Harry Potter series – J.K. Rowling 6 The Bible [I am an atheist, but no one should be able to claim that I arrived at such a conclusion without research] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 41 Animal Farm – George Orwell 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding 52 Dune – Frank Herbert 71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens 72 Dracula – Bram Stoker 81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo 20, so a fifth of the list. I would also like to note that about half of these books are way overrated.
I'm trying to read the Lost key but...it's too hard! If I may suggest, try to read Eco's "the name of the Rose" and "Foucault's pendulum", they're pretty similar to Dan Brown's novels, just better. The intellectual stature of the man is also different: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umberto_Eco I haven't read the Prague cemetery, but it well received.
RE: Dostoevsky. Any list of books that doesn't include The Brothers Karamazov is immediately suspect. I second the recommendation of Foucault's Pendulum and Name of the Rose. I did not like The Da Vinci Code, nor did it entertain me.
