Well, the New Year has rolled in and so too has the (insane?) desire to set myself some exciting challenges!
I've always loved reading, but thought it was time to swap my usual book choices (thrillers, crime novels, chick-lit etc.) for some serious literary classics. After much research (and hours of help from my 'Ginger Genius' friend) I have created my own version of the BBC's 100 Must Read books. My hybrid list includes several of the BBC's choices; although I've swapped some of them (mainly the children's books and the ones I’ve already read) for some future classics.
The challenge is two-pronged; firstly to work my way through the list at a sufficiently reasonable pace that ensures I finish it before I turn grey/ blind, and secondly to use this opportunity to improve my English vocabulary. I will write reviews on each of the books as I finish them and will also share any fabulous new words I learned whilst reading the books. The Road to Self Improvement here I come! Wish me luck - I think I may need it!!!!
(Insanity must be contagious, as a few of my friends have agreed to join me in my challenge! I’ll be asking them to contribute their reviews on the books too. And if any of you lovely readers out there would like to join us on our quest to literary accomplishment then please do. You’d be very welcome to submit your reviews too.)
Without further ado, here is the 100 Must Read Books List:
1. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
2. Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt
3. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
4. Atonement, Ian McEwan
5. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
6. A Bend in the River – V.S. Naipaul
7. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
8. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
9. Breakfast at Tiffany’s - Truman Capote
10. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
11. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
12. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
13. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
14. The Constant Gardener - John le Carre
15. The Count of Monte Christo – Alexandre Dumas
16. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
17. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
18. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
19. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
21. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
22. The Divine Comedy – Alighiere Dante
23. Emma, Jane Austen
24. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
25. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
26. The Five People you Meet in Heaven- Mitch Albom
27. Flowers In The Attic, Virginia Andrews
28. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
29. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
30. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
31. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens 32. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
33. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
34. Harry Potter Series – JK Rowling
35. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
36. His Dark Materials Trilogy, Philip Pullman 37. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
38. Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
39. The Inferno – Dante
40. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
41. Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, Richard Bach
42. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
43. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
44. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
45. Lady Chatterley’s Lover - David Herbert Lawrence
46. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
47. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
48. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
49. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
50. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
51. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
52. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
53. The Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka
54. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
55. Men Without Women – Earnest Hemingway
56. Middlemarch – George Eliot
57. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
58. My Antonia – Willa Cather
59. 1984 – George Orwell
60. One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
61. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
62. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
63. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
64. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
65. No Country for Old Men - Cormac McCarthy
66. Notes from a Small Island – Bill Bryson
67. Papillon, Henri Charriere 68. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
69. Persuasion, Jane Austen
70. The Picture of Dorian Grey – Oscar Wilde
71. The Pillars of The Earth, Ken Follett
72. Possession – AS Byatt
73. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
74. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
75. The Power Of One, Bryce Courtenay
76. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
77. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
78. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
79. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson
80. The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd
81. Skeleton Key, Anthony Horowitz
82. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
83. A Short History of Nearly Everything – Bill Bryson
84. Sons And Lovers, D. H. Lawrence
85. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
86. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
87. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
88. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet – David Mitchell
89. A thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini
90. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
91. To the Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
92. Travels – Michael Crichton
93. Ulysses, James Joyce
94. The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
95. Veronica Decides to Die – Paulo Coelho
96. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
97. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
98. Where the Wild Things Are - Maurice Sendak
99. Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys
100. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
