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)
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
These books were found on 5 of the 6 lists:
- A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
- Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
- Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
- On the Road – Jack Kerouac
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- Ulysses – James Joyce
These books were found on 4 of the 6 lists:
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
- Animal Farm – George Orwell
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Dracula – Bram Stoker
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville
- The Bible
- The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
- Watership Down – Richard Adams
These books were found on 3 of the 6 lists:
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens
- Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Catcher in the Rye – J. D. Salinger
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
- Education of a Wandering Man – Louis L’Amour
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
- The Iliad – Homer
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I might reread it though, this time in English!)
- The Odyssey – Homer
- The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- William Shakespeare- Complete Work
These books were found on 2 of the 6 lists:
- A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- Absalom, Absalom! – William Faulkner
- Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- Angels Everywhere by Debbie Macomber
- Atonement – Ian McEwan
- Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
- Dune – Frank Herbert
- Facing Your Giants by Max Lucado
- Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
- Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
- Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
- Having a Mary Heart in a Martha World by Joanna Weaver
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
- How the West Was Won by Louis L’Amour
- In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D. H. Lawrence
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel
- Like Dandelion Dust by Karen Kingsbury
- McKettrick Men Series by Linda Lael Miller
- Paradise Lost – John Milton
- Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan
- Pride Runs Deep by R. Cameron Cook
- Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
- The Divide by Nicholas Evans
- The Divine Comedy – Dante
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- The Help by Kathryn Stockett
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
- The Lonesome Gods by Louis L’Amour
- 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)
- The Lost Valentine (The Last Valentine) by James Michael Pratt
- The Magus – John Fowles
- The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
- The Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett
- The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli
- The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Shack by William Paul Young
- The Stranger – Albert Camus
- The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- The Trial – Franz Kafka
- Winds of War by Herman Wouk
- 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?
I love reading too, but like you don’t get enough time. Nevertheless I’m quite surprised and pleased at how many of the books on these lists I have read! I always have a book on the go, even if it takes months to read. I read almost every night before I go to sleep – as well as loving reading, it’s a form of sleep aid too, to stop all the thoughts and worries going round and round my mind …
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