Adrian's Reading List

Monday, March 2nd: "I have catalogued my bedroom library. I have got a hundred and fifty-one books, not counting the Enid Blytons."
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

Some of the great (and not so great) works of literature Adrian Mole has read.

The Secret Diary:

Care of the Skin
Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Beano Annuals
The Female Eunuch, Germaine Greer
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Big and Bouncy
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
The Man in the Iron Mask, Alexandre Dumas
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett ("Nigel had hysterics when I said Vladimir and Estragon sounded like contraception pills.")
Eagle (comics)
Woman's Own (on the train)
News of the World
Mill on the Floss, George Eliot
Hard Times, Charles Dickens
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists
Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Sex, the Facts, Dr. A.P.G. Haig
Crash!, William Goldstein, III
Escape from Childhood, John Holt
Glencoe, John Prebble
Progress, Coexistence and Intellectual Freedom, Andrei D. Sakharov
Wuthering Heights, Emily Jane Bronte
Cordon Bleu for the Elderly, Drake Fairclough
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute (not Lewis Carroll)
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Reader's Digest (father's)
The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch ("I can only understand one word in ten.")
Macbeth, William Shakespeare
Pear's Encyclopedia
How Children Fail, John Holt

"My mother reads anything; she is prostituting her literacy."
- The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, aged 13 3/4

The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole

Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (*the diary never actually says that he is reading it, but he quotes from it in a debate in social studies)
The Condition of the Working Class in England, Frederick Engels
The Quiet American, Graham Greene
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
The Cruel Sea, Nicholas "Something" (Monsarrat)
The Good Housekeeping Family Health Encyclopedia
The Whitsun Weddings, Philip Larkin