settling ourselves for a long winter's...read

"The test of literature is, I suppose, whether we ourselves live more intensely for the reading of it."
----Elizabeth Drew

This is the season for reading, at least for me. Though I live in a tropical clime, I still feel the need to slow down, get out my favorite quilt and do a little cocooning at this time of year. Maybe it is my psyche's way of helping to prepare for the mental torture that can sometimes occur with the holdiays and the too much time spent with people I am related to.

Anyway, here is a list of the "100 best novels of all-time," as prepared by someone who thinks they know a thing or two about novels (that would not be me). Please note, no Harry Potter here. No whining. I did not come up with the list. But I do intend to pick one title I know nothing about and make it my new best friend this holiday season.

How about you? Anything on the list you heartily reccomend or are dying to read?
(And thanks to Mel for getting me thinking about this one).

Don Quixote -- Miguel De Cervantes
Pilgrim's Progress -- John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe -- Daniel Defoe
Gulliver's Travels -- Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones -- Henry Fielding
Clarissa -- Samuel Richardson
Tristram Shandy -- Laurence Sterne
Dangerous Liaisons -- Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
Emma -- Jane Austen
Frankenstein -- Mary Shelley
Nightmare Abbey -- Thomas Love Peacock
The Black Sheep -- Honore De Balzac
The Charterhouse of Parma -- Stendhal
The Count of Monte Cristo -- Alexandre Dumas
Sybil -- Benjamin Disraeli
David Copperfield -- Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
Vanity Fair -- William Makepeace Thackeray
The Scarlet Letter -- Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
The Woman in White -- Wilkie Collins
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland -- Lewis Carroll
Little Women -- Louisa M. Alcott
The Way We Live Now -- Anthony Trollope
Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
Daniel Deronda -- George Eliot
The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Portrait of a Lady -- Henry James
Huckleberry Finn -- Mark Twain
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde -- Robert Louis Stevenson
Three Men in a Boat -- Jerome K. Jerome
The Picture of Dorian Gray -- Oscar Wilde
The Diary of a Nobody -- George Grossmith
Jude the Obscure -- Thomas Hardy
The Riddle of the Sands -- Erskine Childers
The Call of the Wild -- Jack London
Nostromo -- Joseph Conrad
The Wind in the Willows -- Kenneth Grahame
In Search of Lost Time -- Marcel Proust
The Rainbow -- D. H. Lawrence
The Good Soldier Ford -- Madox Ford
The Thirty-Nine Steps -- John Buchan
Ulysses -- James Joyce
Mrs Dalloway -- Virginia Woolf
A Passage to India -- E. M. Forster
The Great Gatsby -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Trial -- Franz Kafka
Men Without Women -- Ernest Hemingway
Journey to the End of the Night -- Louis-Ferdinand Celine
As I Lay Dying -- William Faulkner
Brave New World -- Aldous Huxley
Scoop -- Evelyn Waugh
USA -- John Dos Passos
The Big Sleep -- Raymond Chandler
The Pursuit Of Love -- Nancy Mitford
The Plague -- Albert Camus
Nineteen Eighty-Four -- George Orwell
Malone Dies -- Samuel Beckett
Catcher in the Rye -- J.D. Salinger
Wise Blood -- Flannery O'Connor
Charlotte's Web -- E. B. White
The Lord Of The Rings -- J. R. R. Tolkien
Lucky Jim -- Kingsley Amis
Lord of the Flies -- William Golding
The Quiet -- American Graham Greene
On the Road -- Jack Kerouac
Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
The Tin Drum -- Gunter Grass
Things Fall Apart -- Chinua Achebe
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie -- Muriel Spark
To Kill A Mockingbird -- Harper Lee
Catch-22 -- Joseph Heller
Herzog -- Saul Bellow
One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont -- Elizabeth Taylor
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy -- John Le Carre
Song of Solomon -- Toni Morrison
The Bottle Factory Outing -- Beryl Bainbridge
The Executioner's Song -- Norman Mailer
If on a Winter's Night a Traveller -- Italo Calvino
A Bend in the River -- V. S. Naipaul
Waiting for the Barbarians -- J.M. Coetzee
Housekeeping -- Marilynne Robinson
Lanark -- Alasdair Gray
The New York Trilogy -- Paul Auster
The BFG -- Roald Dahl
The Periodic Table -- Primo Levi
Money -- Martin Amis
An Artist of the Floating World -- Kazuo Ishiguro
Oscar And Lucinda -- Peter Carey
The Book of Laughter and Forgetting -- Milan Kundera
Haroun and the Sea af Stories -- Salman Rushdie
La Confidential -- James Ellroy
Wise Children -- Angela Carter
Atonement -- Ian McEwan
Northern Lights -- Philip Pullman
American Pastoral -- Philip Roth
Austerlitz -- W. G. Sebald