(no subject)

[serene]

This is all over my friendslist. Most recently, I think, at maestrodog.

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

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 own LJ (if you want) so we can try and track down these people who've read only six 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 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 Hitchhiker'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 - C.S. 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 (I got through a chapter or two; hated it)
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 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 (some, not all)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
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

Comments

[minimo.livejournal.com]

Too lazy to do the whole meme, but I skimmed through and I think I read about 30 of these. A lot of them were required or optional reading in high school, and I know I have friends that would leave me in the dust. If it's true that most Americans have only read six, that is really lame.

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

Right. Most of those, I read in high school. I certainly wouldn't have read a lot of them on my own. I'm glad I did, in many cases -- Anna Karenina, for example -- but left to my own devices, I mostly read pulp mysteries, and I was even less high-minded about literature back then.

[stonebender.livejournal.com]

I wonder why they list the complete works of Shakespeare as one book? I also wonder why they do that and then list Hamlet separately.

[fla-sunshine.livejournal.com]

I wondered the same thing about the Chronicles of Narnia and the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

[redbird]

One might also ask about Narnia and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but I'm more curious about how the Dan Brown snuck into what mostly looks like a selection of high school and college reading lists, a bit of children's/fantasy lit, and some more "literary" recent fiction.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I wasn't able to find any justification for the choices when I looked. The list's original appearance seemed to be at the Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1544033/The-top-100-books.html), no Big Read affiliations or comments of any kind.

42.

[bitty.livejournal.com]

Usually these memes irritate me because the selection is senseless. And yes, here it is senseless - the whole Hamlet v. Complete Works thing - but for some odd reason I'm viewing it as an "ooh, I haven't read that yet!" list.
:)

[lumpyone.livejournal.com]

I've got about 30 myself read, and only a few I'd want to read. What I found interesting as I saw this on multiple friend's lists was that nearly 50% of the books on here have been made movies. Perhaps the comment I've seen about the Average American has only read 6 of these is in part comment to that? I know there are a good 5-7 of these I've not read but have seen the movie.

I'd imagine the separating of Complete Works of Shakespeare/Hamlet and Chronicles of Naria/Lion, Witch, & Wardrobe is only due to the those 2 being made movies. Sure, other Shakespeare plays have been done as movies but Hamlet has more visibility with both the version Mel Gibson was in, and the super long one Kenneth Brannon did. Of course this is only a guess. :)

Books I've read

[(Anonymous)]

I've read over 50 but then it's the thing I do best-just for myself. Yes, lots in high school, but then lots because I wanted to. Otoh, my best buddy has probably read none, although a successful business woman, so that goes to show how important it all is. I am grouchy now so I won't ask my husband- but classics aren't his style unless it is the Obama series:).