Meme again

[etumukutenyak]

Snurched from niterobin

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've listed below. (Does anyone have a source for this?)

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

[Yanno, that's just too much work for me. I'm going to strike out every book I haven't read instead, and you all can take it for granted that I love books.]

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 - various authors
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
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
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 (But the movie is great for watching on a cold evening with your family)
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' 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
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 (Le Petit 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

Comments

[i-calql8.livejournal.com]

Well, it looks like I come in under the curve at 4 books--Dune, The Hobbit, Hitchhiker's Guide, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I suck.

::hangs head in shame::

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Duuuuuude. You got your work cut out for you. Start now, and you might make a respectable dent in it before the end of the decade. Oh, wait...make that the next decade. I recommend Wind in the Willows, The Count of Monte Cristo, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and Dracula. Once you finish Bram Stoker, read Fred Saberhagen's version of the Good Count.

[i-calql8.livejournal.com]

Thing is, I have this mental block about a lot of these books. I know the plot of most of the books on the list. My brain tells me,"Well, if you know how the story goes, why read it? You know the ending, after all." It's the same reason I can't reread a book.

Spouse the English Teacher would immediately tell me that there's so much I'd be missing by not reading (and rereading) the books, but by then, my brain already has its fingers in its ears saying LA LA LA LA LA I'M NOT LISTENINGGGGG

*sigh* *trudges back to the list to take the first step*

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Ah, that's where I'm the exact opposite. I re-read books to discover what I missed the first time through, or just to re-experience the pleasure of that book.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

You haven't read Swallows and Amazons? And you have a child of suitable age? Fie upon thee!

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Well, see, it's like this: I never heard of it before. However, this list is an excellent reminder of how many books I still need to read before time's up.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

A children's book series set in the Lake District and written by Trotsky's press secretary is something you should read.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

It's in our local library system, although not in my closest branch. Still, I can put in a request for it ASAP.

Which I shall do.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Good for you.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

I've read 31 and have one in the to-read pile. But how can they have

14. Complete Works of Shakespeare

and

98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare?

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

That's not the only double, as Fragano points out below. Yeah, I noticed. A lot of these book memes have those errors; I suspect that being created by committee as well as a desire to have exactly 100 books led to this sad state of affairs.

[mjlayman.livejournal.com]

Probably, although you'd think 100 would be small enough to check carefully.

[i-calql8.livejournal.com]

I chuckled at 'the complete works' making the list. Seriously, who reads them, when you can see them (and no, it's not anything like 'why read the book when you can see the movie')? I've been to the (Tony-award winning) Utah Shakespeare Festival numerous years, and have seen several of his plays done by some of the best actors in the country.

My favorite year was meeting Harold Gould before he played Prospero in The Tempest. Wow. Just...wow.

[etumukutenyak.livejournal.com]

Seeing Shakespeare is way better than reading him.

[niterobin.livejournal.com]

Link to the source is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I've read 51 of the list (though I wonder at the Hamlet/Complete Works and the Chronicles of Narnia/Lion, Witch, Wardrobe doublets).