MEGO: My Eyes Glaze Over

I have marked yes or no beside each one indicating if I have read the book! In some cases I may have written a note on the book

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen – Yes (as above!)
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien – Yes. This book took me ages to get through, I was working for the publisher at the time the movies were hitting the theatres so I felt I HAD to read it. It was a brick – with so many different charactors and places I found it hard to plow through.
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte – Yes.
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling – Yes. I read the first three, after that I was bored of the writing style – so I took a break and never went back.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee – Yes
6 The Bible – No
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – Yes. Emily Bronte is leaps and bounds better than Jane Austen.
8 1984 – George Orwell – yes. If you haven’t read this- you must. One of my favourite, I have read twice and will definitely refresh on this one soon.
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman – No
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens – Yes. Ugh. Almost as bad as Austen. Wordy and boring.
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott – Yes
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller – Yes
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – A lot of them…
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier – Yes
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien – Yes, this was more enjoyable than Lord of the Rings. Read this for a Children’s Lit class in University. Was supposed to be a “Bird” course…but was actually a considerable amount of work (lots and lots of reading!)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks – Yes.
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger – Yes, another one that would make my top 10
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – yes
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot- no
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – no
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald – Yes, also on my top 10!
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens – No
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy -No
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – Yes, Douglas Adams is laugh-out-loud funny. I remember reading them while working at a movie theatre box office laughing out loud by myself. Some folks said they didn’t want to disturb me – but could they buy a ticket.
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh – No
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky -No
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck – Yes
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll – Yes
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame – Yes
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy – No
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens – No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis – Yes
34 Emma – Jane Austen – Yes
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen – Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis – Yes – isn’t this part of the Chronicles of Narnia at number 33?
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini – Yes
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres – Yes
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden – Yes
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell – Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown – Yes
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No, although I have started this book at least 10 times.
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving – Yes, John Irving always surprises- his books are well worth reading.
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins – No
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery – Yes (I read the enitre series in Grade 2-3 I believe, same time I was racing through the Nancy Drew novels)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy – No
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood -Yes, It is too bad her other novels never lived up to this one.
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding – Yes
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan – Yes
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel – Yes
52 Dune – Frank Herbert – No
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons – No
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen – Yes
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth – No
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon – Yes. On my top 10, such a great book.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens – No
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley – Yes, like 1984 – worth reading over and over again.
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon – Yes
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez – No
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov – Yes
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt – Yes, not as great as all the people said it was (but maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for this book at the time)
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold – Yes
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas – No
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac – Yes, he defined a generation. Amazing novelist, what would be different had he lived longer?
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy – No
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Yes. Pride and Prejudice – this completes my point on Jane Austen being nothing more than a romance novelist!
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie – No
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville – No
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens – No
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – Yes
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson – No
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – No
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath – Yes
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome – No
78 Germinal – Emile Zola – No
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray – No
80 Possession – AS Byatt- Yes
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens – No
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell – No
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker – Yes
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro – Yes
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert – No
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry – Yes
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White – Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom – Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – No
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad – Yes
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks – Yes
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams – Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole – Yes, wish I hadn’t wasted my time!
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – No
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas – No
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes (isn’t this covered under the complete works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl – Yes
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo – No

Looks like 60/100 not too shabby.

So, how about you? A few of my other fiction favorites: Thirteenth Tale by Diane Setterfield, The Chrysalids, John Wyndham, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Known World by Edward P Jones.