World Book Day

I'm a library brat, my dad was the caretaker for the local library so the library was sort an extension of my living room. I never paid much in library fines in large part because I would have returned any books borrowed long before the deadline. Sitting on a comfy chair surrounded by bookshelves is quite a blissful way to pass a dull rainy afternoon. And there were many of those in Kerry. The playground was round the back of the library so we could run about kicking a ball and then when it got too wet, we wheeled into the library en masse.

A survey of British librarians gives us this list of 30 books to read before you...well, find yourself in a place where you can't read them anymore.

The Top 30

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible (by God!) - True, I've not read all of it.
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the d'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn