14 July 2008

This Could Be Fun

I stole this from SugarMag.
“Someone” reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. It’s not the Big Read though — they don’t publish books, and they’ve only featured these books so far. In any event...I am not sure who's list this is, I didn't follow the links back far enough.


1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.

3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.


1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
It's in my TBR pile.
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker

8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

1
3. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac

28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White

30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare

31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

32. Complete Works of Shakespeare
Well, not everything the man ever wrote, but pretty damn near.
33. Ulysses - James Joyce

34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

37. The Bible

38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy

40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini Another one in the TBR pile.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole

49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

55. Middlemarch - George Eliot

56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen

62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown It's in "the pile".
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving

66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins

67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert

71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold

78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

83. Dracula - Bram Stoker

84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
I haven't read this one, but have read other of his books.
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome

87. Germinal - Emile Zola

88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

89. Possession - A.S. Byatt

90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens

91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom

96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas


I'll admit there are titles on here that I've never heard of. And some I just wouldn't read - not a fan of schmaltzy Mitch Albom. Oh, and I've read about 60 of the books on the list. I was an English major/teacher, you know, and the list is a bit British classics-heavy and features many, many books by dead white guys.

5 comments:

Jenna said...

I've read a good percentage of that list...thanks to high school and college English courses...very few did I pick up on my own. Interesting List.

Anonymous said...

I have read an acceptable 25 on this list but have seen the movies of at least 25 more- Does that count?

Glad to see you're read Everything is Illuminated again. I LOVE that book.

Anonymous said...

So what do you have against Jane Austen ;-)?

Misc said...

lbotp: I don't have anything against Jane Austen. I tried to read Emma, I did, but found it really boring. I should try P & P, yes? I've been meaning to but am a bit gun shy. :-)

Mary - I think I could read anything by Jonathan Safran Foer. He's amazing. SR2 is winding down - I should be back to book club by August. Hooray!

Jenna - a fair amount of those books are on h.s. English reading lists - I taught a number of them.

The Fearless Freak said...

I'm totally pathetic. I've only read 12 on the list (unless by Anne of Green Gables, you mean the whole series, then that number nearly doubles) and more than half of those are Harry Potter. Sad, sad, sad :(

I never picked that classics off the reading list in high school. Even though they were worth more points, I found I could read more shorter books faster and come out ahead if I didn't get bogged down in the huge books.