Booklist - A fun "test" for homeschoooling parents (and anyone else)

One of my favorite things about homeschooling is the chance to add to my own knowledge and education everyday as I learn alongside my kids. (Of course, adding to my education is also my outside-the-home job at the university, but that still seems different from what we get to do at home.) Anyway, I got this list from Anne Marie's blog and thought it was fun. Plus it's a great way to note some gaps in my own education and reading background to work on filling in the coming years. Feel free to repost on your blog (or just comment) if you'd like. This is a sort of "coming clean" for me about what I haven't read! On the other hand, if they would include a little more world literature (especially Russia, Croatian and Serbian) my list would look more impressive!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

#1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
*2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
**3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
*4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (haven't made time to read them in English, but I'm working on reading one of them in Russian, Croatian and Polish for my dissertation, not sure that counts)
**5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible
#7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Ms. Havisham remains my favorite literary character of all time)
**11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
*14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (lots, but not all)
**15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
*16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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 (I both love it and hate it, but mostly love)
25 The Hitch Hiker’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 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- C.S. Lewis (more than once)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (Austen and I are not friends - Pride and Prejudice was enough Austen for a lifetime for me)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
**36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (many times)
%37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (started it this summer, but got distracted)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne (Quoted regularly at our dinner table)
**41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins -
*46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery (loved this years ago - I wonder if I still would?)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
**49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (have to confess I like it, despite the disturbing content)
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 (not cover-to-cover, but I've read sections)
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 (yeah, I slipped through and managed never to conquer this one)
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
**73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (still one of my favorites, since I was about 9)
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 - Émile 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 - E.B. 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 (Love, love, love it! Watch for a blog about it soon.)
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 (this is making me realize, why have I not read any Dumas? Big gap.)
*98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
%100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I'd like to get to this someday . . . )

OK, so I beat the 6 by a long shot, but I've found some significant gaps I'd like to fill.


Here are my favorites that are not on the list:

Novels:
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Live and Remember - Valentin Rasputin
Bridge on the Drina - Ivo Andrić
A Hero of our Time - Mikhail Lermontov
Sofia Petrovna - Lydia Chukovskaya
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
Eugene Onegin - Alexander Pushkin
The Chosen - Chaim Potok
The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

Short stories:
"The Death of Ivan Ilych" - Leo Tolstoy
"Matryona's House" - Alexander Solzhenitsyn
"Megalos Mastoras and His Work" - Borislav Pekić
"The Gift of the Magi" - O. Henry
Scenes from the Bathhouse - Mikhail Zoshchenko
"To Build a Fire" - Jack London

Plays:
Antigone - Sophocles
Julius Caesar - William Shakespeare
Macbeth - Williams Shakespeare
Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare
Boris Godunov - Alexander Pushkin
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
The Glass Menagerie - Tennessee Williams

Poetry collections by:
Anna Akhmatova
Aleksandr Blok
Emily Dickinson
Christina Rosetti
Carl Sandburg
Robert Louis Stevenson
Daniil Kharms

Other:
A Grief Observed - C.S. Lewis
The Prologue - Nikolai Velimirović
The Ascetic of Love - Mother Gavrilia
D'aulaire's Book of Greek Myths
D'aulaire's Book of Norse Myths
The Mountain of Silence - Kyriacos Markides
Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia - Lubov Millar
The Great Collection of Lives of the Saints - Dimitri of Rostov
Father Arseny: A Cloud of Witnesses - Vera Bouteneff
My Life with Father Alexander - Julianna Schmemann
The Journals of Fr. Alexander Schmemann
The Spiritual Meadow - John Moschos