the book meme!
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) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (gave up halfway through Two Towers)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (may well have read it, but not certain)
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (*loved*? i enjoyed them…)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (parts of it)
7 Wuthering Heights
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (how I haven’t read this one…)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (disliked #1 so thoroughly there was no chance of reading more)
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (again, how i haven’t read it…)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (many, but not all. plus, having this *and* Hamlet on this list is cheating)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (once more with the how i’ve managed to avoid it…)
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 (how I’ve gotten away without reading this, I don’t know…)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (see cheating comment: LW&W shouldn’t also be on this list if the Chronicles are)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (maybe i’ve already read it)
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 (does watching the movie count?)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (again, donno how I avoided this)
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 (started it, gave up early in)
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 (confirmed my utter dislike of GGM’s writing. magic realism and I don’t get on well.)
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 (mighta read this)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac5
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (don’t think I got much past “Call me Ishmael.”)
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 (thought i’d give it a try before next Bloomsday)
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 (mighta read this)
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 (hate hate hate)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (a couple, but by no means all or even many)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (gah)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (started it. gah.)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
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
I gotta say, my friends lists really skew the hell out of “only read 6 of these”, which of course makes it hard to believe that *really* that’s the average, even if I do, yes, understand how averages work. :)
Wow, I’ve actually read 20 of them and started and threw aside about 6 more. I guess all those literature classes in college were good for something. Funny thing was, my favorite professor in college gave me GGM’s One Hundred Years of Solitude as a graduation present. I’ve tried 3 times and have yet to be able to get through it. Ugh!
I can only ask … how did some of these books get on this list??? And better yet, how did some more literary books (IMHO) not? Nice to see my two fave books of all time are on there at 13 and 27 though.
I’ve read 22 on the list, though one book, The Catcher In The Rye, had been banned by the time I got to high school. The majority of those that I have read have been from school work. I read “A Christmas Carol” every year starting Dec. 20 and read 1 “stave” a day, finishing on the 25th. My sister could put about 26 on the list.
I’ve read quite a few…and, like, there was a time in HS & college that I read The Count of Monte Cristo EVERY winter holiday break….so I think I’ve read all of Dumas, most of Shakespeare, and I actually keep a book of Sherlock Holms stories in the car if I run out of reading material. I’ve read all of those several times.
OTOH, I haven’t read Dracula or some of those I think a writer in my genre should.
I recall reading Charlotte’s Web as a child and loved it then, but it’s probably too cute now.
Robin
I have read 23 of them. There those that were required reading in HS and those that the debate teacher insisted that I read. There are 5 that I have started but could not finish. And about 6 more that I think should have been on that list. I agree that the Narnia books and Shakespeare should not have had single titles as well as cronicaled works on the list too.
Yeah, I’m catching up, cause early July was just crazy. But I’ve read 45 of these–and 8 of the top 10. Oh, and that doesn’t count the 3 I didn’t finish– War and Peace, Les Miserables and Wind in the Willows. (I know, I know–what’s not to finish about WitW? But I didn’t.)