As I explained in part one. I used to be a big reader but that has all changed. I can’t recall a single book that I completed in 2012, but surely I did read at least one book!. A dreadful thing to admit… Definitly modeling reading to my children (NOT!) and so unbelievable considering how as a child and teen, I used to devour a book in a few days.

So one of my resolutions for 2013 is to read more. Making it a SMART target- I am aiming for a book a month!

Initially, to help me with my goal, I looked at the  BBC Big Read’s List. Then (I’m sad like this) I gathered up another 5 lists, including The Guardians List and the Penguin’s Classics List and spent an evening sorting them into popularity. The total books at the end of the evening numbered 443. Ive added a few more that I have enjoyed and feel that should get more credit and have removed some that I know that I won’t read eg Lord of the Flies and so have created a massive Bucket Book List.

My thoughts are that I will choose some each year to read and therefore over the years I will get to read them. If God blesses me with another 45 years, I might just do it!

Below is the list of the top 125 books from the various book lists I raided.

Thanks to Mrs Hadden and my wondrous high school English lessons I have been able to tick off many classics and so having a fair starting point!

Full Marks: (These books featured on all 6 lists)

1. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
2. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
3. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
4. Middlemarch – George Eliot
5. Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
6. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
7. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

These books were found on 5 of the 6 lists:

1. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
2. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
3. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
4. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
5. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
7. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
8. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
9. Ulysses – James Joyce

 These books were found on 4 of the 6 lists:

1. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
2. Animal Farm – George Orwell
3. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
4. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
5. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
6. Dracula – Bram Stoker
7. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
8. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
9. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
10. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
13. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
14. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
15. The Bible
16. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
17. The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
18. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
19. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
20. Watership Down – Richard Adams

These books were found on 3 of the 6 lists:

1. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
2. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
3. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
4. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
5. Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
6. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
7. Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
8. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
9. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
10. Education of a Wandering Man – Louis L’Amour
11. Emma – Jane Austen
12. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
13. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
14. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
15. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
16. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
17. Persuasion – Jane Austen
18. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
19. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
20. The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
21. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
22. The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
23. The Iliad – Homer
24. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I might reread it though, this time in English!)
25. The Odyssey – Homer
26. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
27. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
28. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
29. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
30. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
31. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
32. William Shakespeare- Complete Work

 These books were found on 2 of the 6 lists:

1. A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
2. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
3. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
4. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
5. Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
6. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
7. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
8. Angels Everywhere by Debbie Macomber
9. Atonement – Ian McEwan
10. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
11. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
12. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
13. Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
14. Dune – Frank Herbert
15. Facing Your Giants by Max Lucado
16. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
17. Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
18. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
19. Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World by Joanna Weaver
20. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
21. How the West Was Won by Louis L’Amour
22. In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
23. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
24. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
25. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
26. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
27. Like Dandelion Dust by Karen Kingsbury
28. McKettrick Men Series by Linda Lael Miller
29. Paradise Lost – John Milton
30. Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
31. Pride Runs Deep by R. Cameron Cook
32. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
33. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
34. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
35. The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
36. The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
37. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
38. The Divide by Nicholas Evans
39. The Divine Comedy – Dante
40. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
41. The Help by Kathryn Stockett
42. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
43. The Lonesome Gods by Louis L’Amour
44. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien (I have read book 1 and half of 2. Frodo and Sam lost me in the The Dead Marshes)
45. The Lost Valentine (The Last Valentine) by James Michael Pratt
46. The Magus – John Fowles
47. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
48. The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
49. The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
50. The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
51. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
52. The Shack by William Paul Young
53. The Stranger – Albert Camus
54. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
55. The Trial – Franz Kafka
56. Winds of War by Herman Wouk
57. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

Now that I look at this list again… I have a SERIOUS amount of reading to do! My book list for 2013 has 20 books on it and so far I have managed 5 and am halfway through another 2. Not exactly reaching my goal…

But why am I not reading?