Stuff to Say did this one already. Her count came in at 27.
"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
Well, let's see.
- Look at the list and bold those you have read.
- Italicize those you intend to read.
- Underline the books you LOVE.
- Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"
The List:
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte's Web - EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So, I'm at 35. Seriously, who are these people who have only read 6? I feel like I should lose points (or have to mark in scarlet in shame) all the books I own but have not read (7), as well as all those that I have started but not finished (3), some many times. I gave these two categories italics (along with a few others) in the hopes of encouraging myself to read these books some time soon.
[Edited to note that I copied the meme from someone who copied the meme who copied the meme and so on and so forth. As best I can tell, no one seems to know the source of the list or how it was compiled or what order the books might be in. I did find an alternate version, published by the BBCs Big Read, which may in part explain what may be an errant link to the NEA's Big Read. If anyone can find any actual sourcing info, let me know, since I'm super curious.]
[Edited again to note that I believe that the Complete Works of Shakespeare is referring to this specific title (or something similar), though I could be wrong.]
5 comments:
Like you, I find it awfully hard to believe that the average adult (depending on how you define "average") hasn't read far more than six of those books. At least ten of them were assigned reading in the not-especially-good English classes of my not-especially-good high school.
I just stole and posted at my main blog, Breakfast at Tiffany's. I'm actually curious as to how this list was compiled...there's repeats (Shakespeare and Narnia) and it's kinda random...but fun stuff! Thanks for sharing!
I came in at 32 (just missed a third - darn!) but yeah, I own several more yet-to-be-read ones. But seriously -- who has finished Moby Dick? (Or Les Miserables, for that matter. I own it; it's split across two volumes because it's so long; I have yet to crack volume 2.)
I am afraid to do this one. It might start a big reading frenzy at my house and I won't get anything else done.
I've read 50. But it's really not fair to count things like "complete works of Shakespeare" as one. I've read many Shakespeare plays. But complete works?
And Niobe is right; I read more than 6 of these in English class in high school, so who are these other adults?
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