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 - Council of Nicea
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. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
15. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 
16. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
17. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
18. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
19. Middlemarch - George Eliot
20. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
21. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
22. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
23. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
24. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
25. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
26. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
27. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
28. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
29. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
30. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
31. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
32. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
33. Emma - Jane Austen
34. Persuasion - Jane Austen
35. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold 
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie 
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker 
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce 
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery 
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
98. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
99. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

emmadelosnardos:

I don’t know who invented this list but it seems to be made up of the ‘classics’ as well as some recent bestsellers?

Anyway, if 6 is the average number that folks have read, I shudder to think of what standard deviation above the mean my score of 51 places me at. Because as well as loving literature, I am also a social science geek. :)

Well Emma, I’m not an average six either according to this list of somewhat random books.

I’ve read 39 of these books, but did not enjoy all of them, and there is also another 10 that are on my ‘to be read soon’ list and there’s an additional 5 titles which I would like to buy.

It’s quite easy, being surrounding online and in real life by avid readers, to not remember just how small a role books play in the lives of many people.

This list was fun to browse through and think about, but it is not statistically accurate. These titles are not all guaranteed to be on any particular curriculum, so unless an individual has a great love of reading or has taken extensive courses in nineteenth century & modern and postmodern literature, then these titles may be mostly new to him or her.

Different high schools, grammar schools, colleges and universities focus on widely varying texts; thus, one’s assigned reading depends on the country, level of difficult of the course and the professor.

I don’t think that “six is the average” reflects the average intellect of people or that in this case the average is ‘normal’ and, therefore, the desirable number at which to be, but rather that the majority of human beings are presented with few opportunities to read as much as the wish and those that do have such chances for learning unfortunately do not always choose to seize a book.

My suggestion for another text on this list is:

    100. The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde

Any other suggestions? Perhaps Austen’s novels could all be grouped together and that would make room for 5 more titles on a list of 100.

(Source: riptdogmahbrotha)