100 books to read before you die discussion

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 Girls in Love - Jacqueline Wilson(x)

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ()

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ( )

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ()

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 ()

14 The Stand - Stephen King ()

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ()

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ()

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 (x)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (x)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x)

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ()

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (x)

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 (x)

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ()

33 The Godfather - Mario Puzo

34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (x)

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 (x)

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (x)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell ( )

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (x)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )

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 (x)

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ()

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 ()

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 (x)

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ()

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (x)

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas ()

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (x)

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ()

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (x)

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens ()

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (x)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)

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 ()

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-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 (x)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ()

Finished Pride and Prejudice.

Overall, I really enjoyed it, despite the belief that I didn't like Jane Austen.

Finished Heart of Darkness

Wasn't my favorite. Not a critique of the writing, of course, but rather my interest in it.

Finished Lord of the Rings. It took awhile, but the ending made it worthwhile.

Finished Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. An entertaining, quick read.

Finished Dracula. I really enjoyed reading and learning where so many of the horror cliches originally started. The pro-Catholic rhetoric and gender binaries were interesting, too.

Finished On the Road.

Really beautiful writing. I felt completely transported and the characters were written so realistically that I thought, for a moment, that this was an auto-biography and not a novel that captures the spirit of the 1950s lost man--but it did that beautifully. The plot can be hard to follow and centers around the unraveling of Dean, the antagonist, but the manic style contributes to the overall atmosphere of the book. Gorgeous work.

Finished Persuasion.

I loved Persuasion. Obviously, Austen has a formulaic way of writing and writing characters, but Anne was such an empathic character and so easy to love that you're rooting for her from the beginning.

Finished Jane Eyre. Absolutely loved it. Jane is such an interesting protagonist and while the plot was often melodramatic, it made for an interesting read to counter the starkness of the moral pulse that drove the book. I loved it, loved it, loved it.

Uylysses is so difficult. I think this might be the sort of book I need to digest in small pieces as opposed to powering through. I think I'll put it on the back burner and just commit to reading a chapter or so each day. So difficult honestly, I need to have Sparknotes open to guide me through it, though there are incredibly beautiful moments and stream of consciousness is always great.

finished Emma. 500 pages of the same plot and character dynamics as pride and prejudice and persuasion. just happy I finished it after five months.

Finished The Da Vinci Code. Dan Brown seems like one of those professors who spewed a lot of interesting theories as fact to get the jocks who didn't like to read engaged in the class.

Entertaining, sure, but terrible writing and definitely had no place on a list next to books like 1984. Odd choice.

Started Wuthering Heights. So far, so good. I loved Jane Eyre so I can't help but compare the Bronte sisters' writing style to each other. We'll see.

It struck me today how much Jane Austen is on this list. Kind of disappointing, actually, to put FOUR works of Jane Austen on this list--because really, if you read one work by Jane Austen, you've kind of read them all. If I were to do this over again, I'd sub in some other works from other years' lists for some of the Jane Austen.

Finished "Memoirs of a Geisha." Who would've thought an American dude writing about being a Japanese woman would be reductive and misogynistic?