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Sarah (7800 KP) created a post in Bookworms

Apr 3, 2018  
A couple of years ago Goodreads posted a list of their 100 Books to Read in a Lifetime, as voted by users. We may have moved on a little, but personally I think this list still stands.

What do you think? How many have you read?


1. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
2. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
3. The Diary of Anne Frank - Anne Frank
4. 1984 - George Orwell
5. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone - JK Rowling
6. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
7. The Great Gatsby- F Scott Fitzgerald
8. Charlotte's Web - EB White
9. The Hobbit- JRR Tolkien
10. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
11. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
12. Jane Eyre- Jane Austen
13. Animal Farm - George Orwell
14. Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
15. The Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
16. The Book Thief - Markus Zusak
17. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
18. The Hunger Games - Suzanne Collins
19. The Help - Kathryn Stockett
20. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
21. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
22. The Lord of the Flies - William Golding
23. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
24. Night - Elie Wiesel
25. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
26. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle
27. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
28. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
29. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare
30. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
31. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
32. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
33. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
34. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
35. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - JK Rowling
36. The Giver - Lois Lowry
37. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
38. Where the Sidewalk Ends - Shel Silverstein
39. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
40. The Fault in Our Stars - John Green
41. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
42. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
43. Macbeth - William Shakespeare
44. The Girl with a Dragon Tattoo - Stieg Larsson
45. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
46. The Holy Bible: King James version
47. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
48. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
49. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith
50. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
51. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
52. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote
53. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
54. The Stand - Stephen King
55. Outlander - Diana Gabaldon
56. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - JK Rowling
57. Enders Game - Orson Scott Card
58. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
59. Watership Down - Richard Adams
60. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
61. Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
62. A Game of Thrones - George RR Martin
63. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
64. The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
65. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
66. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
67. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - JK Rowling
68. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
69. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
70. Celebrating Silence: Excerpts from Five Years of Weekly Knowledge - Sri Sri Ravi Shankar
71. The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
72. The Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett
73. Catching Fire - Suzanne Collins
74. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
75. Dracula - Bram Stoker
76. The Princess Bride - William Goldman
77. Water for Elephants - Sara Gruen
78. The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe
79. The Secret Life of Bees - Sue Monk Kidd
80. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
81. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
82. The Time Travelers Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
83. The Odyssey - Homer
84. The Good Earth - Pearl S Buck
85. Mockingjay - Suzanne Collins
86. And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie
87. The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough
88. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
89. The Glass Castle - Jeanette Walls
90. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks - Rebecca Skloot
91. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
92. The Road - Cormac McCarthy
93. The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien
94. Siddhartha - Hermann Hesse
95. Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
96. Beloved - Toni Morrison
97. Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese
98. The Phantom Tollbooth - Norton Juster
99. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
100. The Story of My Life - Helen Keller
  
Show all 14 comments.
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Angelicalynnn (21 KP) Jul 6, 2018

I’ve read 30 not to bad but still plenty I would love to read!

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iamsara (130 KP) Jul 19, 2018

14 ?

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes
Suzanne Collins | 2020 | Young Adult (YA)
10
7.2 (5 Ratings)
Book Rating
Quite often after the success of a series when the author comes back to write more, it falls flat. This did exactly the opposite for me! I was hooked from the first couple of pages.
We follow Coriolanus Snow during the tenth Hunger Games as he becomes a mentor to an underdog, the female tribute of district 12 - Lucy Gray Baird. What follows are a series of disastrous events following the tributes and their mentors, which makes you wonder how the Games were still around when it came to Katniss’s Hunger Games.
It was perfect finding out more about Coriolanus Snow, and what made him the way he is when it came to the Hunger Games trilogy. We find out where his love or roses comes from and whether he has always been as ruthless throughout his life or if something made him that way.
Whilst the book seems a bit long when you pick it up, I loved every minute of it and when I was coming to the end I really didn’t want it to end at all! I would love to carry on reading about Coriolanus and what happened after this book and how that shaped him into President Snow.
This has renewed my love for the Hunger Games series, and I hope that Suzanne Collins has more plans for the series as I would love more. An easy 5 star rating from the start.
  
TU
The Unadjusteds (Book #1)
9
9.0 (1 Ratings)
Book Rating
11 of 235
Kindle
The Unadjusteds ( Book #1)
By Marisa Noelle
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

IF YOU COULD ALTER YOUR DNA WITH ONE PILL…WOULD YOU?
THE UNADJUSTEDS is perfect for fans of The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, Divergent by Veronica Roth, Maze Runner by James Dashner, Shatter Me by Tahereh Mafi & The Darket Minds by Alexandra Braken.

When the president declares all unadjusteds must take a nanite, sixteen year old Silver Melody has no choice but to flee the city. She has no genetic enhancements. She is 100% human, and wants to stay that way.

Escaping with her family and friends, Silver plans to hide out and deal with an awkward love triangle while her scientist father makes a cure. But she doesn’t count on her father being captured, on the president setting an immortal army and hellhounds on her tail, or dealing with her crippling anxiety.

Her only chance to recover her father involves teaming up with a new group of unlikely friends and rescuing him before the unadjusteds are wiped out.



Well holy crap that had me hooked! From start to finish I just couldn’t put it down. I love the concept and characters it was a really good YA. This is the second book I’ve read from Marisa and I am really enjoying her writing style. She touches on things that we can all relate to and writes it well. Highly recommended for YA fans. I have to ask would you take that pill?
  
The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins | 2014 | Young Adult (YA)
3
8.5 (277 Ratings)
Book Rating
Contains spoilers, click to show
I gave The Hunger Games trilogy a chance, I really did, but I found myself so frustrated with these books. I know all about the comparison to Battle Royale and here and there I do see where Suzanne Collins was influenced by it, but the books are different. For one thing Koushun Takami's book is better.
 The problem for me, mainly was with the heroine Katniss. I wanted to like her, but I found I could not care about her at all, even after she did the noble sacrifice of taking her sister's place in The Hunger Games. She seems very cold, apathetic, and just drifting along. For a main character there isn't any depth to her and that's sorely disappointing considering the theme of these books. Then we have this pointless love story that is completely unnecessary to the book and it just seems awkward and forced. The only character who seems real to me at all is Peeta while the other characters seem one dimensional. I also found myself frustrated with Katniss because at so many intervals in the story she just gives up so easily like it's as simple as changing her hair color. Are you kidding me with this nonsense?
 I had to keep reminding myself that these were books for young adults and while the writing wasn't bad, the story was not great. If the writing is so poor that you find you can not even care about the characters especially the main one, that's a serious problem. This didn't feel like a dystopian novel at all, sure it was dark and depressing, but that's pretty much it. I need more from something claiming to be a dystopian story. This was more like Dystopia with training wheels. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go read Fahrenheit 451 and Battle Royale again.
  
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The Hunger Games
The Hunger Games
Suzanne Collins | 2014 | Young Adult (YA)
10
8.5 (277 Ratings)
Book Rating
I finished this book for the second time around 15 minutes ago, and I’m still missing being part of its world. Yes, it’s that good. Actually, I read the whole book just today. The first time I read it, just before the film came out, I’d followed a friend’s recommendation to read the books first, and devoured all three in as many days. I then had to give up my Kindle for a few days so that my friend could read it, and she was just as enamoured. I know my American cousins loved it too. Safe to say, it was very popular in my circle of friends! I have heard a couple of dismissive comments saying it’s a rip-off of Battle Royale, but I haven’t read that yet, so I’ll reserve judgement.

Set in post-apocalyptic America, now known as Panem, the book very quickly sets Katniss, the protagonist, up as a fiercely protective older sister. <spoiler>So protective, she learnt to hunt, barter on the black market and generally help her family survive when their father dies and their mother is overcome by depression. So protective, she volunteers in her sister’s place for the practically suicidal Hunger Games.</spoiler> It’s not long into the book that the reaping takes place, but by the time it does, the reader knows all they need to about who Katniss is, where she’s coming from, and also sets the scene for her dilemma over the coming books. I was rooting for her all the way, and the way Suzanne Collins writes from Katniss’s perspective is extremely effective. I was constantly sympathising with her, while at the same time simply admiring how the cogs in her mind worked in helping her to survive. None of it seemed contrived.

I’m a really big fan of dystopias anyway, but I loved what this plot was based on. Collins has said that her idea for The Hunger Games came from reality TV, and what might happen if it got warped. In a society where it’s almost impossible to avoid reality television, the plot is really contemporary, whilst also having a definite mix of Orwell’s Big Brother in there. Having also read the next two stories before, I know it gets a lot darker, but I’ll review those another time. <spoiler>In the TV context, it’s also really easy to see how anything that boosted ratings (the “star-crossed lovers”) would be extremely powerful. It took me a while to get this, but actually, being torn between Gale and Peeta is quite understandable, given the different extremes she knows both under. I suppose comparisons could be made, but it’s definitely no Twilight.</spoiler>

The pacing of the book is done brilliantly (hence why I’ve read it twice, both taking less than a day!). Collins controls the twists and turns of the plot as adeptly as the gamemakers. The main characters are really multi-faceted, and the important themes – action, politics, and yes, even love – all come out in sometimes unexpected places.

Having also seen the film, I’m really impressed with how well it translated across. Obviously, no film can ever compete with the level of detail and the reader’s own imagination in a book, but it was good. I can’t remember what I thought of casting at the time, but I must admit, I did see Jennifer Lawrence and Josh Hutcherson in my mind when reading the book this time. This may come across as a backhanded compliment, but Jennifer Lawrence seems to have the right level of awkwardness/social unease in front of the cameras that I associated with Katniss, and also fits the book’s description.

This review is also on my <a href="http://awowords.wordpress.com">blog</a>; - if you liked it, please check it out!