Top 100 Book List

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

The bold books are those I've read in their entirety, the italicized ones I started but didn't finish or read an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
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 - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - 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
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
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
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
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
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 - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

With the Sun

As the sun comes out

The world warms to its touch.

Your face warm with the beat

Of your heart as our hands brush.

You've said I hold

Your heart in my chest,

I fear I might crush it

If I don't hold my breath.

 

Sometimes it all just seems

Hopeless, the hope I have

In you, in us.

Being bound up in this fraying coil

Where all our hearts reside.

Cos the liers are just outside,

And they're knocking to come in.

Some are in our heads,

Some are in our hearts,

Oh, we're bound with immortal threads.

 

As the cold wind blows

I pull you into my arms.

Our warmth will keep this chill

from our hearts, from doing harm.

You've said I hold

Your heart in my hand,

I fear I might crush it

So in this strength I'll stand.

 

Sometimes I think it seems

Hopeless. The hope I have

In you, in us,

Seems bound up in this fraying coil

Where all our hearts reside.

Cos the liers are just outside,

And they're knocking to come in.

Some are in our heads,

Some are in our hearts,

But we're bound with immortal threads.

Study

Today is the day when study returns;
I leave the crowd behind as I turn
To face the comprehension.

Give me strength and clarity of mind
So as I apply myself, in kind
The knowledge may apply itself.

For if it is to be of use in time
I must not make any delay or I'm
Delaying myself from it's end.

So I'll leave all distractions behind.
For to give up, would be a crime,
When a day has just begun.

Marriage and Weddings

I went to a wedding yesterday, and I enjoyed it. Previously I've associated weddings with adults, friends of the family, and the most enjoyable part of them was the free food. Then a few years ago both my older brothers got married. I enjoyed those weddings, but in both I was part of the bridal party, and so it didn't feel like a real wedding. Plus I was too busy to actually appreciate what was going on.

This time, the wedding was different in so many ways. I knew both the bride and the groom equally, I am good friends with them both; It's the first wedding of my 'peers', I knew them both from uni; and it's the first wedding I've been to since being in a relationship myself.

Seeing the wedding in this new light made it so much more enjoyable, I couldn't stop smiling, because I could see how happy my friends were, and I was excited for their new life. I was able to appreciate what an amazing thing marriage is, and I now see what a great gift it is.

Plus, now I kind of want one too.

The Right Reason

Is it right to do the right thing, but for the wrong reason, knowing that it's for the right reason? That sentence is confusing, so i'll explain the concept a bit. Sometimes it's hard to do the right thing for the right reason. I don't normally steal things, and I don't find it hard to resist it, but not because I know that i'm really stealing from the shops owners, just because I don't want to get arrested. It's good that I don't steal, but it would be better if I did it for the right reasons. So coming back to my initial question, what if I chose to be scared of getting arrested because I knew it would stop me stealing because it would hurt the shop owners. So on the basis of one reason I decide not to do it for another...

 

hmm, I'm not sure if I was able to explain that, let alone justify whether it's right or wrong.