100 books

How many books have you read from Amazon’s list of 100 Books to read in a lifetime?

Brittany over at Perfectly Tolerable tagged me for this fun book tag. I love this kind of list. Back in 1999-2000 there were a ton of lists like this of books that you should read before the new millennium. I did pretty good on those usually only missing a few, and those I did miss I tried to get read in that next year and did pretty well.

This is an interesting list that Amazon came up with. It encompasses a lot of different levels and is a nice mix of fiction and non-fiction. It is probably the non-fiction that kept my score low, I just don’t read that much of it any more. I was glad that they had a statement at the end of the list that explained how they made their choices. Here is the blurb from Amazon that explains their thinking behind the list:

So many books, so little time. With this in mind, the Amazon Books editors set out to compile a list of 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime. We had a few goals when we started out: We wanted the list to cover all stages of a life (which is why you’ll find children’s books in here), and we didn’t want the list to feel like homework. Of course, no such list can be comprehensive – our lives, we hope, are long and varied – but we talked and argued and sifted and argued some more and came up with a list, our list, of favorites. What do you think? How did we do?

On to the tag itself:

How to Play:

Include the link to Amazon’s List
Tag the creator of the meme (Perfectly Tolerable)
Tag and thank the Person that tagged you
Copy the list below and indicate which ones you have read
Tally up your total
Comment on the post you were tagged in and let them know how many you read
Tag 5 new people! (And comment on one of their posts to let them know you tagged them)

Title	Author	Read?
1984	George Orwell	Yes
A Brief History of Time	Stephen Hawking
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius	Dave Eggers
A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier	Ishmael Beah
The Bad Beginning	Lemony Snicket	Yes
A Wrinkle in Time	Madeleine L’Engle	Yes
Selected Stories, 1968-1994	Alice Munro
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland	Lewis Carroll	Yes
All the President’s Men	Bob Woodward
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir	Frank McCourt	Yes
Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.	Judy Blume	Yes
Bel Canto	Ann Patchett
Beloved	Toni Morrison
Born to Run	Christopher McDougall
Breath, Eyes, Memory	Edwidge Danticat
Catch-22	Joseph Heller	Yes
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory	Roald Dahl	Yes
Charlotte’s Web	E. B White	Yes
Cutting for Stone	Abraham Verghese
Daring Greatly	Brené Brown
Diary of a Wimpy Kid	Jeff Kinney	Yes
Dune	Frank Herbert	Yes
Fahrenheit 451	Ray Bradbury	Yes
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas	Hunter S. Thompson	Yes
Gone Girl	Gillian Flynn	Yes
Goodnight Moon	Margaret Wise Brow	Yes
Great Expectations	Charles Dickens	Yes
Guns, Germs, and Steel	Jared Diamond Ph.D.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone	J.K. Rowling	Yes
In Cold Blood	Truman Capote	Yes
Interpreter of Maladies	Jhumpa Lahiri
Invisible Man	Ralph Ellison
Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth	Chris Ware
Kitchen Confidential	Anthony Bourdain
Life After Life	Kate Atkinson
Little House on the Prairie	Laura Ingalls Wilder	Yes
Lolita	Vladimir Nabokov	Yes
Love in the Time of Cholera	Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Love Medicine	Louise Erdrich
Man’s Search for Meaning	Viktor E. Frankl
Me Talk Pretty One Day	David Sedaris
Middlesex	Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight’s Children	Salman Rushdie
Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game	Michael Lewis
Of Human Bondage	W. Somerset Maugham
On the Road	Jack Kerouac
Out of Africa	Isak Dinesen
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood	Marjane Satrapi
Portnoy’s Complaint	Philip Roth
Pride and Prejudice	Jane Austen	Yes
Silent Spring	Rachel Carson	Yes
Slaughterhouse-Five	Kurt Vonnegut	Yes
Team of Rivals	Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Age of Innocence	Edith Wharton
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay	Michael Chabon
The Autobiography of Malcolm X	Malcolm X
The Book Thief	Markus Zusak	Yes
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao	Junot Díaz
The Catcher in the Rye	J. D. Salinger	Yes
The Color of Water	James McBride
The Corrections	Jonathan Franzen
The Devil in the White City	Erik Larson	Yes
The Diary of a Young Girl	Anne Frank	Yes
The Fault in Our Stars	John Green	Yes
The Giver	Lois Lowry	Yes
The Golden Compass	Philip Pullman	Yes
The Great Gatsby	F. Scott Fitzgerald	Yes
The Handmaid’s Tale	Margaret Atwood	Yes
The House at Pooh Corner	A. Milne	Yes
The Hunger Games	Suzanne Collins	Yes
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks	Rebecca Skloot
The Liars’ Club	Mary Karr
The Lightning Thief	Rick Riordan	Yes
The Little Prince	Houghton Mifflin	Yes
The Long Goodbye	Raymond Chandler
The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11	Lawrence Wright
The Lord of the Rings	J.R.R. Tolkien	Yes
The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat	Oliver Sacks
The Omnivore’s Dilemma	Michael Pollan
The Phantom Tollbooth	Norton Juster	Yes
The Poisonwood Bible	Barbara Kingsolver
The Power Broker	Robert A. Caro
The Right Stuff	Tom Wolfe
The Road	Cormac McCarthy	Yes
The Secret History	Donna Tartt
The Shining	Stephen King	Yes
The Stranger	Albert Camus	Yes
The Sun Also Rises	Ernest Hemingway
The Things They Carried	Tim O’Brien
The Very Hungry Caterpillar	Eric Carle	Yes
The Wind in the Willows	Kenneth Grahame	Yes
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	Haruki Murakami
The World According to Garp	John Irving	Yes
The Year of Magical Thinking	Joan Didion
Things Fall Apart	Chinua Achebe
To Kill a Mockingbird	Harper Lee	Yes
Unbroken	Laura Hillenbrand
Valley of the Dolls	Jacqueline Susann
Where the Sidewalk Ends	Shel Silverstein	Yes
Where the Wild Things Are	Maurice Sendak	Yes

Summary:

I didn’t do too badly 46/100 or 46%. There are a few that I saw the movies but didn’t read the books (Out of Africa, Unbroken and The Right Stuff) or at least I don’t think I read them? Sometimes I don’t remember, there were a couple I thought I read but when I looked at the synopsis I knew I never had. A couple of the non-fictions I tried to read, but just couldn’t get through them. Still I am pretty happy with the 46.

While on the Amazon site I noticed that they had one for just Sci-Fi and Fantasy books and one for YA books. I thought I would do great on those two but I only had 41 on the Sci-fi and Fantasy one and 62 on the YA books. Many of the books on both lists had books on my TBR list, so maybe my score will be higher the next time I look.

I’m not going to tag anyone specifically. If you want to do this tag go for it. I might show you how well rounded of a reader you are or not. But have fun and take a look at the other lists, you might find a new book to add to your ever growing TBR list.