Barbara France

Managing Editor

bfrance@lassennews.com

Dec. 7, 2010 — Contests are constantly being added to social networking sites such as Facebook, and many of them are simply silly such as what super hero are you? But recently one was circling that I actually noticed because I am an avid reader. I always have a book or magazine with me, and with the addition of e-readers to the market, I have one of those nearby so I am never out of reading material.

Not too long ago I mentioned a non-fiction, biographical list I want to read, but I really love novels. If the novel is well written and intriguing, I like when the writer chooses to write a series. The Facebook survey suggests the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) said today readers have only read six out 100 of the following books. Because of my college major and some of my high school coursework, I did reach the total of 39. Watching the movie doesn’t count. Some of the books I never heard of and some of the books, I should read again. I remember they were great the first time around, but I probably didn’t enjoy them as much as I could have since I had to write papers about them.

Look at the list, and see how well you did. Most are considered classics or are on their way to being classics. Some are the perfect gift for you child or grandchild. One book not on the list, “Call of the Wild,” by Jack London, I got as a Christmas gift one year but took me a few years to finally read. If children are taught correctly, rarely is a book given away without an attempt to read it, and I really don’t know anyone who has ever thrown a book away.
The list includes:

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; 36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis; 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 (did they need to list Hamlet separately from the Complete Works?); 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl; 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.