that book meme

[meganbmoore]

 snagged from canarynoir:

++++ actual meme bits ensue ++++

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. (too lazy to think about that)
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (too lazy to think about that...)
4) 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 ;-) 

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 [I've read a lot of it, but not the whole thing]
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 {I've read enough that I'm counting it, but nowhere near "all"}
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 {WHAT?  *points above*}
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
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
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 
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}
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 {WHAT?  *points way up*
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo 

Those I read out of interest and not because I was in AP English classes all through high school, and was an English major in college: 16

Comments

[jennawaterford.livejournal.com]

*shoves collected works of Jane Austen into your arms*

Start with Pride & Prejudice or onramp with Northanger Abbey (the silliest but one of my faves anyway).

No, really.

They are all they're cracked up to be (though even I took a few tries to get into Sense & Sensibility).

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Actually, I have Austen in the TBR pile(not all...P&P, S&S, Emma, and Persuasion, I think) I just haven't read them yet. And yet, I've watched many adaptations and researched them...

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

I only briefly went through and counted on my fingers but I think I've only read 8 of those listed D: D: D: NOES, I AM A DUNCE.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think most of us who have read more than a few read most for school...

[woodburner.livejournal.com]

I went to a crappy half-ass backwoods school. :\ The only things on that list I read for school are Brave New World, 1984, and Hamlet. (I had Catch 22 as well, but that book depressed me so much I gave up about half-way through and bullshitted the project we had to do.)

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

*squints* Does anyone know what criteria they used for picking these? Because in addition to the weirdness of listing both series and single books, I'm immediately suspicious of any list that has The Da Vinci Code on it.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

I think it's the books that the publisher has sold the most of over the years. If so, Da Vinci Code isn't as odd, as it was a big seller. (And sounded bad, so I never bothered.)

I think the double listings are things where they have both the singles and the sets. Not that that removes the stupid.

[keelieinblack.livejournal.com]

Ahhhh, that makes sense--I was thinking of another Big Read top list (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml), where the BBC actually had people vote on what to include, so this one wasn't matching up with my memory at all. (And, yes, The Da Vinci Code was quite terrible, which is a shame since it deals with one of my favorite ridiculous conspiracy theories.)

You'd think they'd have automatically excluded the double listings from the start. Unless they think it's a good way to promote a "so important you should read it twice message!"

[the_rck]

I've read thirty-four off the list. At least a third of those were for classes.

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

Yeah...school helps us out, there.

[wasabi-girl1.livejournal.com]

I believe I've read 18 of these. But c'mon, just 'cause I don't wanna read Narnia and LOTR and Harry Potter, doesn't mean I'm not into great literature! :P

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

And I am amused at your choices for great literature. (IMHO, HP is extremely derivative and I've read better without having to put up with an author who claims she didn't know she was writing fantasy until someone told her.)

[wasabi-girl1.livejournal.com]

Exactly. Those are pop lit, and just because I'm not into what's popular, it means nothing! ;)

[desdenova.livejournal.com]

I've read 40/100. Only 9 were for school (and some of those have since been reread in a non-school context).

I feel like I should read some more literary classics.

[droiche.livejournal.com]

I read or partially read 26/100 plus a truckload more that aren't on the list for whatever reason. Hurray for getting a BA in English with emphasis on Lit. -_-

Edit: I suck at math - including counting. (>_<) Yeah. Probably a third or half of the listed books I have read were for classes. Some, like 1984, I read for my own pleasure. Of the ones I read for classes, I honestly enjoyed only a few. The majority of the assigned books that I read that I still like aren't on this list nor are the majority of the "classics" that I read strictly for myself.

[kingcrankycat.livejournal.com]

44/100 -- a fair bit for school, but most for pleasure/curiosity

[wingstodust.livejournal.com]

26/100....... *shrugs*

Snagged the meme, 'cause I thought it looked fun, despite the weird including series and singles thing. ^^;;;

[vierran45.livejournal.com]

On a quick count, I've read about 40/100 of these.

Quite a few for school, but several for my own pleasure as well. Some are still on my TBR list.

Random Research

[jacob.rabidpaladin.com (from livejournal.com)]

I liked the list, but wondered where it came from too. I eventually found out (http://rabidpaladin.com/archive/2008/06/25/book-geek.aspx), but it took some extreme effort.