[Meme] Big Read book list
Jun. 25th, 2008 01:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
edenfallingThe Big Read thinks 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) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
(I am interpreting LOVE to mean LOVE, not LIKE. If I'd gone with LIKE, I'd have underlined a lot more books. As it is, you'll notice that I leaned heavily toward children's books, which sank their hooks into me before I had much cycnicism or skill at literary analysis to shelter me from their effects.)
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (Okay, not Numbers or Deuteronomy, but pretty much the rest of the Old Testament, all of the New Testament, and some of the apocrypha too.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I read it young and suppressed most of it until I had to read it again in high school. I find the appendix on Newspeak more frightening than the story.)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (In three versions, no less -- mildly abridged, unabridged, and condescendingly abridged.)
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I found it hysterically funny until about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through. Then I almost had to stop reading because it was so depressing.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (*counts* Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Romeo & Juliet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well That Ends Well, Love's Labors Lost, every bloody single one of the sonnets... well, it's a start!)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (This always felt just a bit too lightweight, episodic, and reliant on coincidence.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger (I tried to read this twice on my own and never got more than 10 pages in. Then it was assigned for school. The Catcher in the Rye has the dubious distinction of being one of only two books I have ever HATED. There are many books I DISLIKE, but I rarely care enough to waste energy HATING something.)
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 (I've read the first 1/5 to 1/4; this summer I intend to finish the rest.)
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Both the book and the series.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov is still better!)
28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (My father began reading this to me when I was about 8 years old. We got to a part after Toad had acquired an automobile, and when I knew he was going to hideously embarrass himself. I have a finely-tuned humiliation squick reflex -- I made my dad stop reading and have never worked up the nerve to go back and read the book myself.)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Someday...)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis (Um, isn't this included in "The Chronicles of Narnia"? Or maybe they're listing it separately since some people have read the first, most famous book, and quit before finishing the series? I suppose that makes sense, of a sort...)
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 - A. A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (Brilliant. Also creepy and depressing, but mostly brilliant.)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Only if you paid me.)
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 - Lucy Maud Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (Overrated.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Another book I read too young and mostly suppressed.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (Flicked through the first twenty pages or so one evening at work. I might borrow it from the library someday.)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (Good, but flabby.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Fun!)
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (How can you not love this book? It's wonderful!)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Memory suppression strikes again! And again, the kindly curtain of oblivion was ripped away when I had to read this for school.)
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 (Reactions to this book seem to depend on cultural expectations. In America, it's considered one of the dirtiest books around, so I was taken aback to realize that, yes, there's child molestation, but it's a Russian novel. In Europe, it's apparently considered a Russian novel, so people are taken aback at how explicit the child molestation really is.)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The 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 (I keep meaning to read Rushdie's books, but I never know where to start, especially since Haroun and the Sea of Stories is, atypically, a children's book.)
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 - E. B. White (I have a boxed set of White, including Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and the tragically obscure The Trumpet of the Swan. The third one's the best, but they're all lovely and will rip your heart out.)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Only if you paid me.)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (I'm still not sure why I like this so much. I think it may be the vaguely hypnotic effect of the journey, and Conrad's almost poetic precision of language and light.)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Another entry in the grand tradition of children's books that will rip your heart out and make you grateful for the pain.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (Oh look, there goes my heart. Again.)
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 (The digressions are almost better than the plot.)
In conclusion, I've read 45 out of 100, though I think their counting is odd. (Both Hamlet and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are effectively listed twice, for example.)
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've only read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
(I am interpreting LOVE to mean LOVE, not LIKE. If I'd gone with LIKE, I'd have underlined a lot more books. As it is, you'll notice that I leaned heavily toward children's books, which sank their hooks into me before I had much cycnicism or skill at literary analysis to shelter me from their effects.)
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (Okay, not Numbers or Deuteronomy, but pretty much the rest of the Old Testament, all of the New Testament, and some of the apocrypha too.)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I read it young and suppressed most of it until I had to read it again in high school. I find the appendix on Newspeak more frightening than the story.)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott (In three versions, no less -- mildly abridged, unabridged, and condescendingly abridged.)
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I found it hysterically funny until about 1/2 to 2/3 of the way through. Then I almost had to stop reading because it was so depressing.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (*counts* Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Othello, The Tempest, Romeo & Juliet, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Richard III, Two Gentlemen of Verona, All's Well That Ends Well, Love's Labors Lost, every bloody single one of the sonnets... well, it's a start!)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien (This always felt just a bit too lightweight, episodic, and reliant on coincidence.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger (I tried to read this twice on my own and never got more than 10 pages in. Then it was assigned for school. The Catcher in the Rye has the dubious distinction of being one of only two books I have ever HATED. There are many books I DISLIKE, but I rarely care enough to waste energy HATING something.)
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 (I've read the first 1/5 to 1/4; this summer I intend to finish the rest.)
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Both the book and the series.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (The Brothers Karamazov is still better!)
28. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (My father began reading this to me when I was about 8 years old. We got to a part after Toad had acquired an automobile, and when I knew he was going to hideously embarrass himself. I have a finely-tuned humiliation squick reflex -- I made my dad stop reading and have never worked up the nerve to go back and read the book myself.)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Someday...)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. The Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis (Um, isn't this included in "The Chronicles of Narnia"? Or maybe they're listing it separately since some people have read the first, most famous book, and quit before finishing the series? I suppose that makes sense, of a sort...)
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 - A. A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (Brilliant. Also creepy and depressing, but mostly brilliant.)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Only if you paid me.)
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 - Lucy Maud Montgomery
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (Overrated.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Another book I read too young and mostly suppressed.)
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (Flicked through the first twenty pages or so one evening at work. I might borrow it from the library someday.)
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (Good, but flabby.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Fun!)
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (How can you not love this book? It's wonderful!)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (Memory suppression strikes again! And again, the kindly curtain of oblivion was ripped away when I had to read this for school.)
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 (Reactions to this book seem to depend on cultural expectations. In America, it's considered one of the dirtiest books around, so I was taken aback to realize that, yes, there's child molestation, but it's a Russian novel. In Europe, it's apparently considered a Russian novel, so people are taken aback at how explicit the child molestation really is.)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The 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 (I keep meaning to read Rushdie's books, but I never know where to start, especially since Haroun and the Sea of Stories is, atypically, a children's book.)
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 - E. B. White (I have a boxed set of White, including Charlotte's Web, Stuart Little, and the tragically obscure The Trumpet of the Swan. The third one's the best, but they're all lovely and will rip your heart out.)
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Only if you paid me.)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (I'm still not sure why I like this so much. I think it may be the vaguely hypnotic effect of the journey, and Conrad's almost poetic precision of language and light.)
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Another entry in the grand tradition of children's books that will rip your heart out and make you grateful for the pain.)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (Oh look, there goes my heart. Again.)
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 (The digressions are almost better than the plot.)
In conclusion, I've read 45 out of 100, though I think their counting is odd. (Both Hamlet and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe are effectively listed twice, for example.)
