WHAT CAN YOU RECOMMEND?

While on Facebook today, I came across a posting and thought I would share it with you.  I love these kinds of lists related to good literature.  Having spent my entire career as a high school English teacher, I probably have read more of the classics than most readers, but I have a real void when it comes to current literature.  So, I will be focusing on reading the books that are recommended to me by friends and family as a way of rounding out my reading experiences in the future.  But this list isn't about classics and for the most part, it is rather eclectic. Still, I was surprised to see that I have read a little over half of them.  There are a few titles I would like to read and quite a few I have no intention of reading.

At the moment, I am reading two books simultaneously and hope to finish one tomorrow on my flight to see my sister in Florida.   I am loving When You are Engulfed in Flames, by David Sedaris, an essayist for the New Yorker and heard on Public Radio International's This American Life.  I find myself in tears laughing at the quirky and unusual circumstances he finds himself in life and how he finds poignancy in the mundane.  The other book I am reading is Barbara Kingsolver's, The Laguna, that came highly recommended to me by a friend.  I've just started it and hope it is a good beach read.  


When I return to Germany in a week, I will host a book club meeting for the book The Other Hand, in the U.K., by Chris Cleve, or also known in America as Little Bee. It is an astoundingly good read and offers the reader life changing opportunities.  I would recommend it to you with glowing praises.  It is also being made into a film.


This rounds out my immediate reads.  I'm looking for the next good book.  Any suggestions?

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. 

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. 

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses!

Also amend this with an asterix if you've seen the movie/tv version.  

NOTE: The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe belongs to the Chronicles of  Narnia; Hamlet belongs to Shakespeare's collected works

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 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women - Louisa May 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 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 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 Berniere*

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - William 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 - Gabrial 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 Handmaids Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martell

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’s 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*

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 - Charles 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 - 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*(Apocalypse Now)

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*



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