Books - how many have you read?

I am a voracious reader. Always have been. Admittedly, I read a lot of trash, but in amongst that, especially of late, I've been reading books with a bit more substance to them. I've been making a list on my IPod of both favourite authors and of books that I've seen recommended, and this had been great when I've gone to the library (and if I've got any funny looks for wandering about with a list on my IPod, I've not noticed them).

Whilst having a look for recommended books on line, I came across this list which was apparently created for the Big Read some time ago. I am very late to the party. Apparently they think that most people will only have read six of the one hundred books here. Well, I took that as a challenge and thought others might enjoy it in a similar vein, so I have reproduced it here. So, here is how it works:
1. Look at the list and bold the ones you have read.
2. Colour the text of those you intend to read but haven't got around to.
3. Italicise the books you love
4. Pass this around so that others can do this and maybe it will encourage people to pick up authors they might not have thought to try.

1. Pride and Predjudice - 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 Eigthy Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip 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 - J R R Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Travellers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh.
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Doestoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Caroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - C S Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C S Lewis
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corellis 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 - L M Montgomery
47. Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaids 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 Nighttime - 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 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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - A S Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Colour 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.

There are lots of great books missing off this list of course, but I found it quite interesting that most of my reading appears to have been confined to British or American authors. Its also interesting how many of the books I was introduced to in childhood have made it onto the list.

If you take the challenge, were you surprised by the results? I had read 37 from the list though I had started more than that and laid them aside because I couldn't take to a character or the narrative didn't grip me. There is a fair amount of Dickens on the list but I've never managed, despite repeated attempts, to get past about page twenty of any of his books. I've read some Shakespeare, having studied it at school, but because the entry is "the collected works" I didn't mark that one, although I've read Midsummer Nights Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Anthony and Cleopatra and, my personal favourite, The Tempest. The list reminded me of books I had always meant to read so my IPod list of authors has grown again. I daresay I will be able to find some of the older books in Kindle format, free. I was surprised by how many really good books are available as free E-Books and have downloaded quite a number to the IPod already.