book meme!

[hellison]

Another book meme, via tyrell

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
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) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

So basically, if it's bolded and underlined then I really liked it. If it's crossed out, I have no intention of reading it.



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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible well, not ALL of it, but a fair whack
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 (Erm… not read ALL of them…)
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 (And this is different from 33 how?)
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
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 started this, never finished
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 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



58 - people have really only read SIX of those? Kids books alone would cover that...
Tho I think what we've mostly learned from that is that I REALLY don't like Thomas Hardy. The miserable fucker.

If there's one I'd recommend that people aren't likely to have read off that list, it's Cold Comfort Farm. Damn good - and very funny - read!

Comments

[repton-infinity.livejournal.com]

Heh. I had to read _Tess_ in high school. Wrote an essay in an exam explaining how much I thought the book sucked. Unfortunately my teacher was a major Thomas Hardy fan (been on pilgramages to England, ekcetra). Didn't do so well on that test :-/

(my other memory of that book is sitting reading, then suddenly thinking: "WTH is going on here?" I would have to turn back about 4-5 pages before I found something I actually remembered reading)

I reread _Treasure Island_ recently -- quite disappointed that it's not on the list!

[hellison.livejournal.com]

Hated Tess. HATED. So bloody depressing!

Also had to reread the woodlanders, which was mostly about trees. And also miserable.

It is an odd list, i'm not sure how they were chosen or why.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

I had thought it was from the BBC Big Read, but they don't match: http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml

And it's definitely not the NEA Big Read, which has completely different books.

[kanaalzahir.livejournal.com]

What, six of them? I've read between 50 and 60. I reckon even my non-reading husband reaches six. (And why do you get one point for Hamlet and one for Shakespeare´s collected works?)

Grantedly, if it's the average person on a global scale it makes sense, because pretty much all of them are from the English-speaking world.

[mollydot.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing that that 6 bit got added on afterwards. It doesn't even make sense. Has the Big Read published more than 100 books?

After mostly just finding the meme on google, I found this: http://rabidpaladin.com/archive/2008/06/25/book-geek.aspx

It appears the list is from a World Book Day poll. The above poster is wrong about the claim originating from irysangel though - she says she got it from meganbmoore who says she got the meme from canarynoir. (megabmoore has the average 6 claim too, I haven't checked canarynoir)