Laugh out Loud Book Club discussion

Supposedly these are the top 100 reads of all time, posted by The Big Read, claiming that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list.

How many have you read?

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 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 - 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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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
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 - A. S. 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
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

This seems like a good list to go by. I think next year when I set my goal for that year's reading, I will try to complete this list. I've read 10, but probably about 75 of the others are on my TBR shelf and I am currently reading Little Women.

I've read 15, but I have many of the others on my TBR list.

Perhaps we should start a challenge, to challenge the rest of the group and ourselves to read the books on the list. It would have to be at least a year long. What do you think about it Jamie?

Good idea, Linda. I wouldn't mind reading most of the books on the list, but I think it would probably take several years for me. I've just got so much planned out already with other challenges that I know I wouldn't be able to read more than a couple each month. I'm interested to see if anyone else would like to do this. I've always meant to read the Bible all the way through, too - this would be a good incentive, but it would take quite a while!

You are quite right! The Bible in itself takes about a year to read. I will think about a way to do this. Maybe, depending on page number, I can give them a point range so that we can keep track that way? Maybe it shouldn't have a time limit, but just keep track of our points? Hmmm... does anyone else have any ideas?

Well i'm horrible. I can't count a single one. I've only read 4 of the 7 Harry Potter books and like half the bible. so i have not completed any. I have a load of them on my TBR list tho.

Really nice list!..I read Harry Potter and The Hobbit...And Still reading time traveler's wife...MOst of those books i REALLY want to read!:)

Atonement,secret Garden,and Jane Austen's ( want to read them)
I'm going to start reading Lord of the rings soon...

I'm going to start reading LotR soon as well.

58. Not bad, I think. But why are some books on the list twice? Like, Shakespeare's complete plays and then Hamlet.

That I don't know about, but 58 is awesome!! :) Maybe they want you to be able to count Hamlet and other singles if you haven't read the complete collection? That's just a guess...

Hopefully I will be able to finish the list one day... I'm up to 15 (5 up from where I was before).

I've read 25 of them (and a few more I think i might have read but can't remember for sure so I'm not counting them.)

I've read 16 and soon to be more, because a lot of those we are reading in school.

Done 26 on this list, some I must admit with english teachers standing over me whip in hand demanding that I expand my mind beyond the realm of comic books, over all though an excellent list although I might have swapped something out for farenheit 451.