Birthday Post

[fiat_knox]

Poached from newbis:-

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 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
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
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'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 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 - have a copy
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I personally would further recommend the following titles:-

- Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley
- The Tao te Ching, by Laozi
- The Art of War, by Sunzi
- The Prince, by Niccolo Machiavelli
- The Will to Power, by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Beyond Good and Evil, by Friedrich Nietzsche
- Contrarywise, by Zohra Greenhalgh
- Trickster's Touch, by Zohra Greenhalgh
- The Way of Wyrd, by Brian Bates
- The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene and Joost Elffers
- The Principia Discordia, either the Loompanics edition or the Steve Jackson edition
- The Illuminatus! Trilogy, by Robert Shea and R A Wilson
- The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce
- Wild Talents, by Charles Hoy Fort
- Stranger in A Strange Land, by Robert A Heinlein
- Starship Troopers, by Robert A Heinlein
- Time Enough for Love, by Robert A Heinlein
- Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card
- Mythago Wood, by Robert Holdstock
- The Naked Sun, by Isaac Asimov
- The Caves of Steel, by Isaac Asimov
- The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov
- Childhood's End, by Arthur C Clarke
- Rendezvous with Rama, by Arthur C Clarke
- The Midwich Cuckoos, by John Wyndham
- The Chrysalids, by John Wyndham
- Chocky, by John Wyndham
- Ringworld, by Larry Niven
- The Tar-Aiym Krang, by Alan Dean Foster
- A World of Ptavvs, by Larry Niven
- Protector, by Larry Niven
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M Pirsig
- Neuromancer, by William Gibson
- Count Zero, by William Gibson
- Mona Lisa Overdrive, by William Gibson
- Virtual Light, by William Gibson
- Idoru, by William Gibson
- All Tomorrow's Parties, by William Gibson
- Cities in Flight, by James Blish
- A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula K LeGuin
- Chocolat, by Joanne Harris
- Tales from the Thousand and One Nights
- The Qur'an
- The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
- Excession, by Iain M. Banks
- Casting the Runes and Other Short Stories, by M R James
- The Colour out of Time, by Michael Shea
- Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury
- The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury
- Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, by Philip K Dick
- Lies, Inc., by Philip K Dick
- Ubik, by Philip K Dick
- VALIS, by Philip K Dick
- The Doors of Perception, by Aldous Huxley
- Sunglasses After Dark, by Nancy A Collins

... and many, many more - all of which books I have, at some point in my life, not only read, but loved, and which have each shaped my persona in a thousand different ways.