Book meme

[ivyfic]

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

Two were taken out of the list because they were repetitive (Hamlet & The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien*
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (well, Golden Compass)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott*
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (all of them? No. But most of them)*
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier*
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien*
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell*
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald*
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll*
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame*
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis*
34. Emma - Jane Austen*
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I actually put this one down in the middle—couldn't take it)
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne*
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery* (I read most of the series)
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons*
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen*
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas*
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding*
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (though not for lack of trying)
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens*
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett*
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens*
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Again*
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (in French and English)
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas*
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl*
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo*

A little skewed, I think, since some are entire series. Depending on how you count those, I've read 29. And I've asterisked the ones I've seen the movie, TV, or musical version of. :)

Comments

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

It's a weird selection. Why Bridget Jones' Diary? I mean, fun book, but I didn't think it was earth-shattering. Why Midnight's Children and not The Satanic Verses? (Of course, i'm annoyed since I read the latter and not the former. Actually, there's a number of books here where I've read other things by the author but not the particular work mentioned. I feel like I should be getting credit for Gabriel Garcia Marquez for Autumn of the Patriarch, dammit!)

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

Wow, and the typing just went out the window there.

And here I was thinking I was all literate and stuff for having read a lot of those books...

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was annoying for me, too. (Your point, not the italics.) I've read Dostoevsky, just not Crime and Punishment. I've read most of Shakespeare, but not all. I've read all of Chronicles of Narnia, twice. And what's with all the Jane Austen? I have no idea what the definition of "Top" is, maybe top seller? Also interesting that it's all fiction...and then there's the Bible.

What really bugged me was The Lovely Bones. Really? Really? I'm not even as bugged by Dan Brown being on that list, I've given up being annoyed by that, but The Lovely Bones is a deeply, deeply flawed book.

[jethrien.livejournal.com]

...I liked The Lovely Bones. While I didn't read Da Vinci Code, I did read Angels and Demons, which I was vaguely disgusted by. At least Bones tried to do something, even if it didn't totally succeed. But Dan Brown is such a bad writer, he really annoys me.

I, too, have read most of Shakespeare, but not all. I've also read most of the Bible, but not all of it. (I've read all of the New Testament, and large chunks of the old, but there's a whole lot of ancient Jewish law and begats that I haven't ever bothered to slog through.)

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

But the begats are the easiest way to come up with NPC names!

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

So what you're saying is that you've read the Bible to become a better GM.

[cubby-t-bear.livejournal.com]

Yup!

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

I'd like to try to see if I can answer a couple of questions re: why certain books. 1) Why Midnight's Children and not Satanic Verses? Well, Rushdie won the Booker Prize for Midnight (which catapulted him to fame), not for Satanic Verses (despite the fatwa and all the attention), and it actually was pretty earth-shattering when it came out as it is widely recognized as ushering in a new age for Indian authors in English. 2) Why all the Austen? She is (despite her unfortunate chick-lit label nowadays, and horrible film adaptations) widely considered to be one of the most incisive writers in the English language and of her time - I know there are those who disagree with me on this, but there it is (on par with Dickens - who has quite a few on the list himself), and also credited as one of the authors who ushered in the modern novel (i.e. not in epistolary form - though Cervantes' Don Quixote usually takes the big prize on that count). I agree on some others - Bridget Jones? Really? That's just a Jane Austen re-hash - a fun read, but not groundbreaking (Austen already did it, right?) Also, same on the "I've read some from an author, but not the one on the list" - e.g. Dostoyevsky - I read Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, but not Crime and Punishment.

[mithras03.livejournal.com]

And really, who out there HAS read all of Shakespeare, aside from some random academic?