Check out this awesome collection of 100 essential books.  I agree with a lot of the books, and there are some fantastic photographs that go along with each title.  Interesting to look at and to read!!

This post is for the Day of Blogs 2008! I am blogging for Children’s Literacy Initiative. For more information about what I am doing, please click here, or you can sponsor me!

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

The instructions:
Look at the list and:
Bold those you have read.
Italicize those you intend to read.
Underline the books you LOVE.

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. 1984 - 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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
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 - AA 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’ 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 - 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 - EB 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

Hat Tip: Sassymonkey Reads

I recently read a book that I REALLY enjoyed. It’s about a guy who decides to follow all the rules in the Bible for a year as literally as possible. Not just “love thy neighbor,” but also all the weird rules about facial hair, dietary needs, etc. I thought I’d just be amused by this book, but it’s actually made me think quite a bit! The author is not a Christian, yet he treats the Bible with quite a bit of reverence, and allows himself to be open to new ideas and theology.

I won’t go into too much detail about the book because I really feel like it’s worth the read! But part of what struck me so much about this book was the amount of research that A. J. Jacobs put into the different rules he was reading about (and the reasons behind them). He read hundreds of books during this process, and shared a lot of his findings throughout the book. Here are a few of the books that I’ve added to my wishlist as a result of reading this book:

- Reading the Bible Again For the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously But Not Literally, Marcus J. Borg
- Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture, John Shelby Spong - very divided reader reviews on this one!
- God: A Biography, Jack Miles
- Unauthorized Version: Truth and Fiction in the Bible, Robin Lane Fox - more divided reader reviews
- Daily Life in Biblical Times, Oded Borowski

Also, Jacobs uses the website Charity Navigator to help him figure out how to tithe his money. I think this is a really neat site, and I’ve added it to my bookmarks!

There’s also another website that he mentioned called MoveOn.org. I’m still not 100% what this website’s purpose is, but I’m intrigued.

And on the rare off-chance that A. J. Jacobs is “self-Googling” (pg. 151) - I LOVED your book!  I have Post-It notes all over my book and send a copy to my mom.  Thanks for the great read!

I enjoyed doing this last year, though I didn’t read as many books as I intended to (grad school will do that to ya)! Here’s a list of what I’ve read this year. Please feel free to share what you’ve been reading!

January

February

March

1. See Jane Date, Melissa Senate
2. The Tenth Circle, Jodi Picoult

April

3. The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible, A. J. Jacobs

May

4. Baby Proof, Emily Giffin
5. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
6. The Bitch Posse, Martha O’Connor
7. The Twentieth Wife, Indu Sundaresan
8. She’s Come Undone, Wally Lamb

June

9. Straight Up and Dirty: A Memoir, Stephanie Klein
10. Wolves in Chic Clothing, Carrie Karasyov and Jill Kargman
11. Yoga Mamas, Katherine Stewart
12.Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper, Diablo Cody
13. Sweet Ruin, Cathi Hanauer

July

14. Slightly Single, Wendy Markham
15. Slightly Settled, Wendy Markham
16. Slightly Engaged, Wendy Markham
17. Slightly Married, Wendy Markham
18. Slightly Suburban, Wendy Markham

August

19. Stacked: A 32DDD Reports from the Front, Susan Seligson
20. The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway, William Goldman