soifollowjulian

My good friend Tzuen posted the BBC booklist; 100 books which they say the average person has only read six of the books. I’ve read 47 but I don’t agree with their list. Here is theirs:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone – J.K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible – Various
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8. 1984 – George Orwell
9. Northern Lights (the Golden Compass) – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Ubervilles – Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Nifenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot
21. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
25. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
26. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
27. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
28. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
29. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
30. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
31. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain
32. Emma – Jane Austen
33. Persuasion – Jane Austen
34. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
35. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
36. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis de Bernieres
37. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
38. Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
39. Animal Farm – George Orwell
40. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
41. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
42. A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
43. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
44. Anne of Green Gables – L. M. Montgomery
45. Far from the Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
46. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
47. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
48. Atonement – Ian McEwan
49. Life of Pi – Yann Martel
50. Dune – Frank Herbert
51. Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
52. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
53. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
54. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
55. A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
56. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
58. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
59. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
60. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
61. The Secret History – Donna Tart
62. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
63. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
64. On the Road – Jack Kerouac
65. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
66. Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding
67. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
68. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
69. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
70. Dracula – Bram Stoker
71. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
72. Notes From a Small Island – Bill Bryson
73. Ulysses – James Joyce
74. The Inferno – Dante
75. Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransom
76. Germinal – Emile Zola
77. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
78. Possession – A.S. Byatt
79. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
80. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
81. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
82. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
83. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
84. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
85. Charlotte’s Web – E. B. White
86. The Five People You Meet in Heaven – Mitch Albom
87. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
88. The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
89. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
90. The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
91. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
92. Watership Down – Richard Adams
93. Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
94. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
95. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
96. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
99. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
100. Brideshead Revisted – Evelyn Waugh

Here is my own list, although it only goes up to 75; I wanted to leave room for growth. Most of these books I’ve read multiple times and have stayed with me over the years. Others are newer books, but when I read them the first time, I knew that I would be rereading them.

I wrote my masters thesis on The Ground Beneath Her Feet by Salman Rushdie and it was published!

Salman Rushdie creates his own literary version of the history of rock and roll in his novel The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Instead of using a general and realistic narrative, Rushdie draws from mythology and popular culture. Starting with an unreliable biographer, Rushdie creates an alternate reality to ours, making the reader question the narrator’s integrity. His book is populated with famous artists and musicians, including Andy Warhol, Lou Reed (as a woman), Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. The female protagonist is based on both John Lennon and Yoko Ono, allowing Rushdie to explore the birth, growth, and death of an icon. She reinvents herself through clothing, hairstyles, and names. Rushdie offers a complex study of what a rock star means to society and why fans need to identify with famous people. He explores the role of musicians in politics and social change. In addition, Rushdie reinterprets the Orpheus myth by using John and Yoko as the basis for Orpheus and Eurydice. In addition, he condemns the commodification of the artist after he dies.