cross posted at HMS_Mercury
Taken 'cause Karen asked me to.
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) Bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Copy, paste, & repeat.
5) Starred next to the books you're reading/have read some of.
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 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. I own them now. :D
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- I hated this book with a firey passion.
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 - I'm going to start reading "Reading Lolita in Tehran"- does that count?
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - I appreciate the movie versions of these books so much. otherwise it just drags on and on and never finishes! HAVE YOUR REVENGE ALREADY, DANTES!
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac*
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy*
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker- Epistolatory novels make my day full of rain clouds and the desire to kill the people who write them.
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 I got through about half and love the 2004 movie. That was the summer I read War and Peace; I was sick of big books.
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- most of them, when i was about twelve and too young to follow what was going on.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery- I hate this book. I had to read it for french TWICE.
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 Several times. I love Hamlet.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Karen, I see your 32 and raise you 14. 46 books out of 100.
Damn. I must not read much current stuff....
Posts
A lot on the list looks like the standard list of classics one might find on the Oprah Book club or The Guardian. The Guardian is a good newspaper -- here's its list.
ReplyDeletehttp://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,,1061083,00.html
Anyone can read a book he/she was told to read by some kind of authority figure, such as The Guardian or some pretentious professor who hasn't published anything himself and doesn't really know how the publishing industry works, but how did that book get on the list? You need to question that list a bit. I mean, just because you've read the book, have you really READ the book?
Like... is Lord of the Rings really that good? Kind of tedious a lot of the time, mediocre prose style... and one of the most racist books (and movies) I've ever read (and watched.) If it weren't set in fantasy land (which provides a convenient ideological cover), most readers would be appalled by its racism and orientalism.
And Memoirs of a Geisha? Why would anyone want to read a book written by a white American man about Japanese geisha? Creepy, really creepy. There's a reason why no Japanese person was involved in the making of the movie. Why are Americans so fascinated by their own voyerism? There are lots of novels written by Japanese women out there-- much better -- but maybe Americans are afraid of what the Asian woman really has to say. For instance, Natsuo Kirino's novel _Out_ is incredible (and it's current.) But if you have a thing for Geisha, there's always Kawabata's Snow Country -- a bit old and nostalgic and, of course, sexist, but he did win the Nobel prize.
What's the difference between a Jane Austin novel and a Sweet Valley High novel? Just wondering.
In addition, I notice you have not a single book by a black person. Why not? Toni Morrison? Ralph Ellison? Zora Neale Hurston? James Weldon Johnson?...
Sorry, I'm being a bit mean here, but lists of books... one of my pet peeves. I think it's because people seem to think that just because you've plowed through a list of supposedly "great" literature, then you are smart or have some foundation for understanding... um... understanding... what, I don't know. But really it just means you plowed through a list.