101 Books to Read Before You Die - Day 4, My Favourite Book

Another impossible decision imposed upon me, and yet again I shall avoid it with aplomb. As you may know I am a passionate reader, and I pride myself on reading books that teach me something. I have read a lot of good books in my time - some of which I have thoroughly enjoyed, others of which have been rather bitter disappointments. Despite my dedication to literature generally there are certain gaping, and rather embarrassing holes in my reading, and so in order to remedy this I set myself a task. Exclusive Books, a book store in South Africa released a list of 101 Books to Read Before You Die. I have been reading in and around this list for about a year now.

Unfortunately, occasionally I get distracted by some lesser popular culture (lost a couple of weeks of valuable reading time to those bloody Twilight books) but I am moving through it, and reading some goodies that might be related to the list along the way. I have also invested in some of the ones left to read which I consider a step in the right direction too. So here it is:

The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Spud - John van de Ruit
The Power of One - Bryce Courtenay
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
Shantaram - Gregory David Roberts
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Disgrace - J. M. Coetzee
My Sister's Keeper - Jodi Picoult
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Cry, the Beloved Country - Alan Paton
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time - Mark Haddon
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
I Know This Much is True - Wally Lamb
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
War And Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Clan of the Cave Bear - Jean M. Auel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Possession - A. S. Byatt
Perfume - Patrick Suskind
The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende
Chocolat - Joanne Harris
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Alexander McCall Smith
Q & A - Vikas Swarup
Dune - Frank Herbert
Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Fugitive Pieces - Anne Michaels
River God - Wilbur Smith
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Mort - Terry Pratchett
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky
The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
East of Eden - John Steinbeck
The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
The Other Boleyn Girl - Philippa Gregory
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas - John Boyne
The Prince of Tides - Pat Conroy
Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
The Shipping News - E. Annie Proulx
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
Watership Down - Richard Adams
Magician - Raymond E Feist
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Day of the Jackal - Frederick Forsyth
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Shriver
The Magus - John Fowles
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Agaat - Marlene van Niekerk
The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
The Shell Seekers - Rosamunde Pilcher
The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
The Beach House - James Patterson
Doctor Zhivago - Boris Pasternak
Kringe in 'n Bos - Dalene Matthee
The World according to Garp - John Irving
Northen Lights - Phillip Pullman
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Shades - Marguerite Poland
Kane and Abel - Jeffrey Archer
Fiela se kind - Dalene Matthee
Story of an African Farm - Olive Schreiner
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
The Magic Faraway Tree - Enid Blyton
Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
Winnie-the-Pooh - A.A. Milne