Book "Meme"

[tesla]

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

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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
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
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 Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (reading it right now, ironically enough)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[barondave.livejournal.com]

Start Dickens with A Tale of Two Cities and go on from there, if it suits you. I haven't read Les Mis but The Hunchback of Notre Dame was great. And so on and so on...

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I love the "where to start" guidance because it's usually a really good way to tell whether I should bother reading anything else by the author.

What do you think of Dickens?

[barondave.livejournal.com]

We read Dickens in High School, and I haven't been terribly tempted since. The trick to Dickens is to remember that he was very popular after his first few novels, and when a new work came out -- in sections, in newspapers -- it was an event, like the publication of the Harry Potter books. And he got paid by the word.

In general, I liked the books I read: Strong plot, interesting characters, vivid descriptions. Wordy by today's standards but a lot of it holds up.

While any list of merely 100 that covers two centuries of literature is going to have to pick and choose, it does seem fairly female heavy (given the proportion of Dead Males usually involved). Bronte and Austin but not Verne or Wells. Any such list without Mark Twain is ignorable.

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Tale of Two Cities was my favourite Dickens, as well. I only got round to reading Great Expectations in my late 20s, but enjoyed that too. For school I had read Oliver Twist (Gr 7 -- didn't particularly enjoy it) and Bleak House (university -- really enjoyed it, but it's a huge time investment -- as was the miniseries last year based on it -- I only managed to watch the first hour or so, but apparently it was really good).

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Now you, my dear, are most impressively well-read. Brava!

I notice that you marked "The Time Traveler's Wife" as a "won't read." It's in my "to read" stack currently. Do you know something about this that I don't know?

[zinzinzinnia.livejournal.com]

Now you, my dear, are most impressively well-read. Brava!

Kinda comes with the territory. :)

I notice that you marked "The Time Traveler's Wife" as a "won't read." It's in my "to read" stack currently. Do you know something about this that I don't know?

Nope. Just read the back cover blurb a while back and decided, "Hm. Nope, not interested." Of course, unless it becomes a movie there's always a chance that it may end up on a school summer reading list for a course I'm teaching, in which case I may end up reading it after all, but for now I've got far too many things on my "must-read" list.

BTW, of all the items on that list probably one that I can recommend as being little-known but superlative is Cloud Atlas. It would take me a long time to describe it properly. Suffice it to say it's really quite like nothing else I've ever read, and is quite a masterful experiment in storytelling.

[jbru.livejournal.com]

Well, I've read (if I remember correctly) at least 24 from that list, putting me substantially above average. I think it's weird that they list, for example, Hamlet as well as The Complete Works of Shakespeare.

The real question is, what do the differing sizes of bolded titles mean!? ;)

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

Phooey - it means that I don't have the patience for f-ing around with fonts any more than I've already done, thanks. :)

[opheliac-9.livejournal.com]

Well you've certainly read more off the list than I have ;)

I meant to get this posted earlier but got distracted while at work--all compiled n' everything. S'pose it'll still be there tomorrow.

I have a few of the italicized ones if you're interested...

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

I'm actually about half-way through Jude right now though, so that'd have to wait just a bit ;)

[tesla-aldrich.livejournal.com]

I've read "The Golden Compass" but not the other two.

Hardy's "The Well-Beloved" is currently in my to-read stack.

Said stack is up to my thigh right now, so I think all of them will have to wait a bit, but once I whittle it down I'd like to take you up on the offer - thank you!

[guppiecat]

FYI, I found the His Dark Materials trilogy to decline in quality relatively quickly into book two. Book three was just painful.

The Count of Monte Cristo is good if you can really get into the whole revenge thing. I suspect it was either for me to read as a teenager than it would be now.

[skylarker.livejournal.com]

I've read 40 from that list - with a lot of overlap with what you've read.