Not sure who created it, but it is interesting to read the "meme list" and see which ones you have read. So here it is:
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Books with a star (*): Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog 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 (I haven't read the entire series.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible-Though I must admit not cover to cover…
7 . Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four* - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Phillip 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 . The Complete works of Shakespeare (I've read many of them, but not all.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit* -J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler'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
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
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 St. 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
An interesting list if nothing else. If it is a list of top 100 books published it makes sense because popularity does not necessarily equate to quality (case in point, the Da Vinci Code), though many on the list are books I've definitely enjoyed.
A few I'd add by the listed authors...if you're going to read Dahl, you have to read "James and the Giant Peach", "Saturday" by Ian McEwan, and "The Blind Assassin" by Atwood.
Looks like I've got some reading to do! I think my count was 34.
Reading...after my mcat that is...
6 comments:
Hmmm, 17 for me. But of those, few have been read in recent years. Now all I read is 'Pajama Time!' and magazines...
I'm the same. I wondered if it said something about my literary refinement that most of my favorites from the list are children's books....hmm....
Well 35 for me. Though I'm horrified to note that the Kite Runner made the list. Nowhere even close to a classic.
Jude the Obscure should remain obscure. It is the story of a stalker, but nobody acts as if this is obvious. Very odd. There are good books to read about deviant personalities, but this is not one.
Lolita is. Disturbing material, but the writing is beautiful. Nabokov and Conrad both moved to France. Translated their works into French. Moved to English speaking countries and translated their works into English.
They both write so well in their third language, that other writers seem to be in a different category. The criticism of Conrad, by Chinua Achebe, is nonsense.
Catcher in the Rye is overrated. A poor man's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Of those you have not read, that I have, Alice in Wonderland is a must read. Also - Animal Farm, Of Mice and Men, and Lolita.
A Confederacy of Dunces is another must read book by an amazing author. The introduction explains its history. Ironically, the only laugh out loud book on the list.
Some of the classics I never finished, or started. :-(
Oh harsh Curmudgeon! Just because there were no sympathetic characters and it had a hopeless ending doesn't mean it shouldn't be on the list. We're talking top 100 books sold and it was a best seller. Just like Bridget Jones...I mean come on! In a list of classics that clearly does not belong either.
Rogue:
"Jude the Obscure should remain obscure."
Hilarious.
Great. Now another handful of books to tack onto the ever growing list...so many books, so little time.
Both Jude the Obscure and Lolita were books that I read as part of book discussion groups. I stopped both about 1/3 of the way through.
The group discussing Jude all wished they had stopped.
The group discussing Lolita convinced me to ignore the disturbing nature of the material and read the rest. I did. It was definitely worth it. I had been focusing on the disturbing aspects and not the writing.
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