Sunday 30 May 2010

50 Books to read before you die

Quite some time ago, my parents bought me a bookmark with a list:
50 Books to read before you die.
On the list are a lot of famous must-read books. Since I'm a huge fan of reading I really hope to read the whole list. And I figured.. The next months I have some free time... So this is the challenge: I have to read those 50 Books this year. That means I've got a lot of reading to do. I'll post a little something about each book. Fortunately, I already read a few of them. Unfortunately, the list begins with The Lord of the Rings triology, which of course are three books instead of one. We have Lord of the Rings in or book collection at home and I will start tomorrow. I kind of wonder if I'm not asking too much, but wish me luck!

The List:

1. The Lord of the Rings triology by J.R.R. Tolkien
2. 1984 by George Orwell
3. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
4. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
5. To kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
6. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
7. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
8. A Passage to India by E.M. Forsfer
9.The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
10. Hamlet by William Shakespeare
11. A Bend in the Rivers by V.S. Naipaul
12. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
13. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
14. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
15. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
16. The Diary of Anne Frank by Anne Frank
17. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
18. The Bible by Various
19. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
20. Ulysses by James Joyce
21. The Quiet American by Graham Greene
22. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
23. Money by Martin Amis
24. Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
25. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
26. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
27. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
28. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
29. Alice´s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll
30. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
31. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
32. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
33. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
34. The way we live now by Antony Trollope
35. The Outsider by Albert Camus
36. The colour Purple by Alice Walker
37. Life of Pi by Yann Martel
38. Frankenstein by Mary Selley
39. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
40. Man without Woman by Ernest Hemingway
41. Gulliver´s Travels by Jonathan Swift
42. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
43. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
44. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Dafoe
45. One flew over the Cockoo´s Nest by Ken Kesey
46. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
47. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
48. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
49. The Divine Comedy by Alighieri Dante
50. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde 


Karin.

3 comments:

  1. hello Karin,
    actually Lord of the Rings is just one big fat novel in six books (as Tolkien intended it to be)..its division in three parts, Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and Return of the King was because of the paper shortage after WW-II...
    and just out of curiosity, who is your favorite author?? (curiosity because you have such a nice taste in books :D )

    also, If I may so, I object that Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment is not in the list (which is a GREAT book) but Dickens' A Christmas Carol is (which is just a nice book)

    Ahmad

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  2. Hi,
    I do know the films of Lord of the Rings, but everyone keeps telling me that the books are better. (:

    My alltime favourite author is Jane Austen. I fell in love with the books when I was 15.

    Maybe you didn't see that I didn't make the list. So I can't edit it, but thank you for the suggestion. If I ever finish the list, I'll try to read that one too.

    Karin.

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  3. hey,
    believe me, everyone is SO right! the books are all more awesome and detailed than the movies (though little can be added to that 11 hours of Tolkien-ness :P)..you should totally read the books. Also, I don't know why, Peter Jackson changed some of the events in the movies and cut some parts too...so books are richer than the movies..

    I think Jane Austin is one of the few authors one can read at any age and still enjoy. I read Sense and Sensibility when I was 16...and the day I finished it, I bought The Complete Works of Jane Austin :P

    And I know that the list is from some bookmark...I was just pointing out that they've left some great authors and have not included the best of some. IMHO, the best work of Dickens is A tale of two cities, then David Copperfield, Great Expectations and then A Christmas Carol

    Ahmad

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