That book meme

[siercia]

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) 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 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 Hitchhiker'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
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


Really, I have to admit to being highly skeptical of a "great books" list that includes Bridget Jones's Diary - I'd like to know how they define "top 100".

Comments

[thespian.livejournal.com]

I was also skeptical of it because of things like listing 'The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe', and also 'Chronicles of Narnia', or 'The Works of Shakespeare' and 'Hamlet'.

There's a lot of YA on this, too.

[jost.livejournal.com]

How any top 100 book list doesn't include "Stranger In A Strange Land" is beyond me... And I also have it on good authority that "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" kind of has to include "Hamlet" lest it no longer be "Complete".

[ratphooey.livejournal.com]

Someone on my FL googled and found the original list.

However, I can't be bothered to go back and correct my original post.

[kdinconn.livejournal.com]

I would assume that the list is more accurate as found here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

[asnevitt.livejournal.com]

that list is comprised of their reader's votes on their favorite novels. And is that Big Read organization different from the one here in the U.S.?

I know there is a college in the Southwest that bases their entire curriculum on the Top 100 books in western literature. It would be interesting to compare.

[kdinconn.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, interesting. When I looked up the Big Read on wikipedia (because we all know that wikipedia knows everything) it referenced only the BBC Big Read (which is a very similar list to the one used in the meme). But upon further searching there is in fact the US Big Read sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (http://www.neabigread.org/). The NEA Big Read does have a list of featured books but it does not appear to have any sort of top 100 list.

[tool-of-satan.livejournal.com]

I've read 28 and listened to one (unabridged). Maybe one more depending on what is in the Blyton collection - I read a bunch of Blyton when I was a kid.

But yeah, it's a wacky list.

[asnevitt.livejournal.com]

Wow, I've read 53 of the books on your list. Does that mean I can stop reading now?

As if....

[bookwitch.livejournal.com]

You know, I thought the same thing about Bridget Jones' Diary. *heh*

[nemomori.livejournal.com]

A major absence of Sci-Fi greats makes me cringe. No Stranger in a Strange Land, no Foundation Series, No Robot Series. Yeah there is Dune, but Dune wasn't fantastic in my opinion, good yes - amazing no. I suppose I can at least be thankful that Atlas Shrugged didn't make the list.

27 read on the list (I never finished Les Mis.)

[(Anonymous)]

661/2