Tuesday, July 1, 2008

Reading List

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.

  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 blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

The List:

  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
  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 Meany - 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
  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

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:

niobe said...

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.

Mama Bunny said...

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!

Nicky said...

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.)

HereWeGoAJen said...

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.

Deborah said...

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?