Confessions of Fangirl

According to the BBC, people have read an average of 6 of this books.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen [x]
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [x]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte [x]
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [x]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [x]
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 [x]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott [x]
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 [x]
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot [x]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [x]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [x]
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams [x]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [x]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll [x]
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 [x]
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [x]
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne [x]
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell [x]
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 [x]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [x]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen [x]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [x]
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [x]
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 Tart
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas [x]
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [x]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [x]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett [x]
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 [x]
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 - EB White [x]
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-Exupéry
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  [x]
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [x]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [x]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [x]

I have actually read more than half of the works of Shakespeare, which is well, probably a sad, but that's what happens when you're an overachiever in high school who turns into a literature major in college. Though there's still a lot I haven't read yet. Some of 'em I'll get around too and some, well my overachiever days are mostly over, or at least on hiatus.

I have a lot of faves on the list, no way could I choose). But least favorites are easier. Please understand that when is say they are my least favorite it doesn't mean I don't think they are valuable reads or literature. It means that they were painful for me to read.

Most painful reads (of the ones I read):

Grapes of Wrath: a depressing forced read (a lot of books I've on this list I read by choice, so I make that distinction), I did not agree with my Lit Prof who claimed the ending was "hopeful", I don't even feel like it had an ending, which is part of what makes it a classic, but I'm talking about why I found it painful to read, I'm not criticizing the art of it.

Moby Dick: it takes them a 3rd of the book to get to the boat, there's an entire chapter on the whiteness of the whale - instead of symbolic it seemed pretentious, and "Call me Ishmael" does not intrigue me as I wasn't invested in the character then or at any point in the story.

Shadow of the Wind: the idea behind the plot is pretty brilliant (maybe overly complicated for me right now) - unfortunately the beauty of the language was lost in the translation and ended up sounding convoluted and bombastic, I couldn't read more than ten pages at time without falling asleep and it's not short, on top of that I felt like I was reading the mind of an ADD fifteen year old boy and um kind of ew actually, which just made the language sound incongruous and ingenious. I'll pass on reading the prequel, thanks.