Reading List

Via ***Dave, a list published in The Guardian of the books a group of British librarians decided every adult should read before they die. (Or at some point in their life, if you prefer a more positive spin on your list-making.) As Dave did, I'll bold the ones I've read already.

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
• The Bible (well, most of it. Did Old Testament in a class in college, and I am a Catholic after all. Spent most of my formative years in Catholic school and religion classes.)
• The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
• 1984 by George Orwell
• A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (I think. I mean, I'm pretty sure I have. I own the book, which doesn't always mean I've read it, but I'm almost poisitive I have. Or I know it well enough from repeated viewings to feel like I have.)
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
• His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
• Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks (really don't think this needs to be there, since I found it a dreadful bore. So many other, better, WWII books. Almost anything by Jack Higgins, for instance.)
• The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
• The Lord of the Flies by William Golding (Kill the pig, drink his blood, blah, blah, blah...)
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
• Tess of the D'urbevilles by Thomas Hardy
• Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
• The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
• Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
• The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
• The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
• Life of Pi by Yann Martel
• Middlemarch by George Eliot
• The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
• A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
• A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

While I'm sure I could come up with some righteous anger at some of the authors or books they've left off the list (What, no Mark Twain?! No Alexandre Dumas!? No Danielle Steel?!?!?!?), for the most part I think it's a pretty interesting reading list. Not the be-all-and-end-all, but I'm ok with that.