101 Books to Read before you die.

Just came across a post on a fellow teachers blog  ‘From Korea With Love’ about a list of ‘101 books to read before you die’ by the Exclusive Publishing company. These books were all selected by the readers themselves.

“The books that made the list are the books you’ve read, and re-read, books which define eras, created friends instead of characters, entertained generations and have become legends of literature”

The books in bold are ones I have read already and the books in italic are ones I hope to read throughout my year in Korea. As I still have no T.V or Internet in my apartment I spend hour every night reading books. In the last few weeks alone I have read ‘Catcher in the Rye’, ‘Catch-22’, ‘Angry Young Spaceman’, ‘Stupid White Men’, ‘To Cut a Long Story Short’, and ‘Kane and Abel’.

I’ve read 25/101…not bad but a lot more to read. No worries though, I’ve plenty of time. How many of these have YOU read??

 

The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Have read this in English and French!)

The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (Read while on holidays few years ago)

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (a classic, love this book!)

To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (Studied this for my Junior Cert in School!)

The Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (Many, many, many times!!!)

The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolverb (Read this just before coming to Korea, thanks Mum!)

The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho

Life of Pi – Yann Martel

The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (Love all the Dan Brown books)

The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy

Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

Spud – John van de Ruit

The Power of One – Bryce Courtenay

The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien (Read this while in Canada 2 years ago)

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres

Shantaram – Gregory David Roberts

Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (Read this many times too)

Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (Finished last week…!)

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Disgrace – J. M. Coetzee

My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult (Tear-jerker…!)

The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

Catch-22 – Joseph Heller (Finished this last night!!)

Pillars of the Earth – Ken Follett

Gone with the Wind – Margaret Mitchell (Read this in school years ago)

Cry, the Beloved Country – Alan Paton

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time – Mark Haddon (my Dad has 3 copies of this so have read it 3 times haha)

Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (just starting this now…!)

Atonement – Ian McEwan

Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand

The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I Know This Much is True – Wally Lamb

A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell

War And Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Clan of the Cave Bear – Jean M. Auel

The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera

The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery

The Secret History – Donna Tartt

Possession – A. S. Byatt

Perfume – Patrick Suskind

The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende

Chocolat – Joanne Harris

The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith (Read the whole series while in South Africa)

Q & A – Vikas Swarup

Dune – Frank Herbert

The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (Another lovely classic childrens tale)

Fugitive Pieces – Anne Michaels

River God – Wilbur Smith

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

Lord of the Flies – William Golding

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis  (Read back in school, years ago…)

Mort – Terry Pratchett (Read about 2 years ago and then got to MEET Terry Pratchett at a talk in Trinity college!)

Crime and Punishment – Feodor Dostoyevsky

The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood

East of Eden – John Steinbeck

The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco

The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory

The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas – John Boyne (Read while on holidays in Egypt last year!)

The Prince of Tides – Pat Conroy

Rebecca – Daphne du Maurier

Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding (Ya gotta love this book!)

The Shipping News – E. Annie Proulx

Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

Animal Farm – George Orwell

The Red Tent – Anita Diamant

Watership Down – Richard Adams

Magician – Raymond E Feist

Middlemarch – George Eliot

The Day of the Jackal – Frederick Forsyth

We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

The Magus – John Fowles

The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

Agaat – Marlene van Niekerk

The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

The Shell Seekers – Rosamunde Pilcher

The Colour Purple – Alice Walker

The Beach House – James Patterson

Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak

Kringe in ‘n Bos – Dalene Matthee

The World according to Garp – John Irving

Northen Lights – Phillip Pullman 

Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides 

Shades – Marguerite Poland

Kane and Abel – Jeffrey Archer (Absolutely LOVE Jeffrey Archer, have read ALL his books to date)

Fiela se kind – Dalene Matthee

Story of an African Farm – Olive Schreiner

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (Another childhood classic that I loved!)

The Magic Faraway Tree – Enid Blyton (Me and my sister used to love this book as we has a ‘magic tunnell tree’ on out farm!

Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe

Winnie-the-Pooh – A.A. Milne (Gotta love Tigger! )