Our 100 Book Journey

My humble book collection. 

Almost everyone everywhere every year comes up with their own new years resolution. My wife, my son and I are no different. This year we decided to start a family project - to come up with a list of 100 books to read in our lifetime and start reading them. We got this idea when we were watching The Equalizer by Denzel Washington. In this movie Denzel Washington's character had a list of 100 books he wanted to read in his lifetime - an idea he got from his wife. The movie got us interested in this project and we decided to do it.

There are a few immediate benefits to this project:
  1. It is very cheap - we both love going to the Public Library so access to these books was fairly easy and cheap. Some people want to go on a trip or buy a cool new gadget but this project costs nothing. 
  2. It is very easy to do. Me, my wife and my son can read and that is basically all that is required. It does not require any preparation, special skill or equipment. Just get the book, find a couch and start reading. 
  3. It gives the three of us more things to talk about. Reading the same set of books allows us to have a topic to talk about all the time. It allows us to learn more about each-other as we share our varying perspective on the stories and the characters in the stories we read. 
  4. It widens our perspective in life. The list of books we will read covers a wide range of topics exploring the mundane to the deeply philosophical. Being able to explore different philosophies and world-views through the characters in these stories, I believe, will make us better persons. 
With these benefits in mind it was a very easy call to make the three of us agreed to take on this project together. Below is the list of 100 Books we will ready in our lifetime:


      1. 1984, George Orwell 
      2. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
      3. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
      4. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens*
      5. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
      6. Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain*
      7. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
      8. Animal Farm, George Orwell*
      9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
      10. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
      11. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
      12. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley*
      13. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
      14. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
      15. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
      16. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
      17. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
      18. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
      19. Don Quixote, Miguel De Cervantes*
      20. Dracula, Bram Stoker*
      21. Dubliners, James Joyce
      22. Emma, Jane Austen
      23. Eugenie Grandet, Honore de Balzac
      24. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley*
      25. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
      26. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
      27. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
      28. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
      29. Grimm's Fairy Stories, The Grimm Brothers
      30. Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift*
      31. Heidi, Johanna Spyri
      32. Holes, Louis Sachar
      33. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
      34. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
      35. Les Misérables, Victor Hugo*
      36. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
      37. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding*
      38. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez*
      39. Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
      40. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden*
      41. Memoirs of Fanny Hill, John Cleland
      42. Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
      43. Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka
      44. Middlemarch, George Eliot
      45. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
      46. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
      47. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
      48. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
      49. Notes from the Underground, Fyodor Dostoevsky
      50. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
      51. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
      52. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez*
      53. Paradise Lost, John Milton
      54. Persuasion, Jane Austen
      55. Pinocchio, Carlo Collodi
      56. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
      57. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
      58. Siddhartha, Hermann Hesse*
      59. Tales of Terror and Mystery, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
      60. Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
      61. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain
      62. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
      63. The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger*
      64. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
      65. The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas père
      66. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown*
      67. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
      68. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
      69. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
      70. The Jungle, Upton Sinclair
      71. The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper
      72. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving
      73. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
      74. The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
      75. The Lost World, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
      76. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
      77. The Phantom of the Opera, Gaston Leroux
      78. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
      79. The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
      80. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
      81. The Provost, John Galt
      82. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
      83. The Return of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
      84. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
      85. The Stand, Stephen King
      86. The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
      87. The Thirty-Nine Steps, John Buchan
      88. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
      89. The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
      90. The War of the Worlds, H. G. Wells
      91. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
      92. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum
      93. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
      94. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
      95. Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Jules Verne
      96. Ulysses, James Joyce
      97. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
      98. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
      99. Watership Down, Richard Adams
      100. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë

There are a few books I have already read in this list (marked * in the list) and I plan to re-read some of them since I no longer fully remember the story. I have also decided that when I read a story that I really like I will buy it and add it to my book collection (see top photo). While I was going through this list and comparing it to the books I have collected so far I realized that most of the things I read are non-fiction. So this project will have another added benefit to me as it will re-introduce me to the world of fiction. 

I know the list looks daunting but we are excited to take it on. If you are looking for a project to start this year as a family or a couple try this out and let me know how it goes for you. If you have done this project already then I would love to hear how it went. I will update you about my progress regularly as I will be blogging about my thoughts on the books that I finish. I am about to finish reading my first book in this list - George Orwell's 1984. 



 Up Next: 1984 by George Orwell - Are we living in an Orwellian Society? 


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