Another book meme!
Snagged this from t_eyla. Apparently The Big Read claims the average adult has only read 6 books from their "top 100" list. SO. The meme is to see how you compare:
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.
Honestly, nearly all of these probably ought to be in italics, as I intend to read absolutely every book in the world. Heh. But I'll italicize the ones I REALLY want to read.
NOTE: Some of these I read as a child, and barely remember at all. I'll point those ones out.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Never could get into it.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Sooorta counting this as read, despite (as stated a few posts ago) not having read the last one. Close enough?
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Own it. Couldn't get into it.
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - If this one doesn't blow your mind, you probably don't have one to be blown.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Read when I was 11, adored, but I don't remember it well.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Read a shortened kid's version of this, but not the real thing.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - It's okay, but not one I'd exactly recommend.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - So far I'm only up to two tragedies and three comedies, so I've got a ways to go on this one.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Read as a child, adored, can't recall well.
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 - If you're on my friendslist and you haven't read this - WHY NOT?!
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 - One of my FAVOURITE books to re-read as a kid, you'd think I'd remember this more clearly. Should still have it somewhere...
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - I don't think I read the last little bit of this, but I tried so fucking hard, I'm counting this as read. I was in 7th grade, and I thought it was the most boring book in the fucking world. After Great Expectations, this was a huge disappointment.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - I read The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, but got stuck on A Horse and His Boy. Oh, but for the record? CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, DAMMIT.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Not sure why this is listed separately from 33, but okay.
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 - Genuinely unsure if I've read this. I own and adore Now We Are Six, though. But it must be remembered always that it's a product of it's time - I don't think I'd allow a child to read it now.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Brilliant book.
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 - Read as a child, barely recall, but I wasn't too impressed, honestly. Her Emily of New Moon triology was better, even if it does get soap-ish toward the end.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Ugh. Pathetic rip-off of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and what's more, Atwood can't admit she writes speculative fiction. I hate this book and I hate her.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Loved this one, but it helped I was studying Freud at the time (and still fascinated by his crackpotness), as the potential for Freudian analysis of this book is great.
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 - Own it. Looks like a monstrosity.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Own it, didn't get more than a few pages in before misplacing my copy. Nice, eh?
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Oh god, I find Steinbeck's style excruciating for even short stories. Don't know if I can face someday reading this one.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Counting as read because although I haven't technically read the second half, I've read so many interpretations of it - fictional and non-fictional - that I can honestly say I know the latter half pretty well. And the only part really worth reading is the first half, ANYWAY.
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 - I suppose.
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - Too cute, although I don't know if I'd put it on a "top 100" list. Where the FUCK is EDGAR ALLEN POE on this list, dammit? Where is BRADBURY? WHERE IS HEINLEIN?! I CAN KEEP GOING!!
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Read swiftly in the fifth grade, REALLY don't recall.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Read shortened versions, ALWAYS wanted to read the full thing, and have never gotten to it.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Read Interview With A Vampire or some other modern vampire tale. THEN...read this. It will blow your fucking mind what modern vampire fiction actually came from. Can't say I "loved," this, but it was interesting.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Read as a child, barely remember. Hell, seen more than one play version I think, still don't remember that well. I had a "secret garden," themed diary at one time, too.
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 - I actually wrote a poem about one of the characters in this one. Not for school, just because I loved it so much. Although I didn't hesitate to submit it for a poetry assignment either, because I'm lazy like that.
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 - I seem to recall this book breaking my heart, once upon a time.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - I LOVE what little of the Sherlock Holmes stuff I've read, but it isn't much.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - One of my favourite books of ALL TIME.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - LOL CAN I COUNT REDWALL HERE? Okay, no.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Just shortened versions, I think.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - This is No. 1 on my list of his tragedies - I own it - and yet somehow every time I go to read it, I get pulled away from it.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Buuut...I liked Matilda better.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Okay...I repeat:
-Where is Poe?
-Where are...several sci-fi authors I can think of? If the Guide is on here, why not Ender's Game? Why not Stranger in a Strange Land? Those are seminal works. Well, the latter is, anyway.
-If Dracula is on here, why not Frankenstein? (Female author? *cough*) They both HUGELY influenced the horror genre, and the latter also had a strong influence on science fiction. The latter is FREQUENTLY left off these sorts of lists. Hmm.
-If this list is for Americans...hmm. Where is Toni Morrison?
-If 74 (at least) is non-fiction, where is, say, The Diary of Anne Frank?
ARRGH. Lists like this always frustrate the crap out of me.
I'm waiting for my juice to get cold, which is annoying. I hate drinking things which aren't either HOT or COLD. We have cold drinking water in the fridge, but I don't want to use it up.
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.
Honestly, nearly all of these probably ought to be in italics, as I intend to read absolutely every book in the world. Heh. But I'll italicize the ones I REALLY want to read.
NOTE: Some of these I read as a child, and barely remember at all. I'll point those ones out.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Never could get into it.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Sooorta counting this as read, despite (as stated a few posts ago) not having read the last one. Close enough?
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Own it. Couldn't get into it.
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell - If this one doesn't blow your mind, you probably don't have one to be blown.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Read when I was 11, adored, but I don't remember it well.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Read a shortened kid's version of this, but not the real thing.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - It's okay, but not one I'd exactly recommend.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - So far I'm only up to two tragedies and three comedies, so I've got a ways to go on this one.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Read as a child, adored, can't recall well.
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 - If you're on my friendslist and you haven't read this - WHY NOT?!
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 - One of my FAVOURITE books to re-read as a kid, you'd think I'd remember this more clearly. Should still have it somewhere...
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - I don't think I read the last little bit of this, but I tried so fucking hard, I'm counting this as read. I was in 7th grade, and I thought it was the most boring book in the fucking world. After Great Expectations, this was a huge disappointment.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - I read The Magician's Nephew and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, but got stuck on A Horse and His Boy. Oh, but for the record? CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER, DAMMIT.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Not sure why this is listed separately from 33, but okay.
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 - Genuinely unsure if I've read this. I own and adore Now We Are Six, though. But it must be remembered always that it's a product of it's time - I don't think I'd allow a child to read it now.
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Brilliant book.
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 - Read as a child, barely recall, but I wasn't too impressed, honestly. Her Emily of New Moon triology was better, even if it does get soap-ish toward the end.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Ugh. Pathetic rip-off of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and what's more, Atwood can't admit she writes speculative fiction. I hate this book and I hate her.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - Loved this one, but it helped I was studying Freud at the time (and still fascinated by his crackpotness), as the potential for Freudian analysis of this book is great.
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 - Own it. Looks like a monstrosity.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - Own it, didn't get more than a few pages in before misplacing my copy. Nice, eh?
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Oh god, I find Steinbeck's style excruciating for even short stories. Don't know if I can face someday reading this one.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - Counting as read because although I haven't technically read the second half, I've read so many interpretations of it - fictional and non-fictional - that I can honestly say I know the latter half pretty well. And the only part really worth reading is the first half, ANYWAY.
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 - I suppose.
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - Too cute, although I don't know if I'd put it on a "top 100" list. Where the FUCK is EDGAR ALLEN POE on this list, dammit? Where is BRADBURY? WHERE IS HEINLEIN?! I CAN KEEP GOING!!
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - Read swiftly in the fifth grade, REALLY don't recall.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Read shortened versions, ALWAYS wanted to read the full thing, and have never gotten to it.
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Read Interview With A Vampire or some other modern vampire tale. THEN...read this. It will blow your fucking mind what modern vampire fiction actually came from. Can't say I "loved," this, but it was interesting.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Read as a child, barely remember. Hell, seen more than one play version I think, still don't remember that well. I had a "secret garden," themed diary at one time, too.
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 - I actually wrote a poem about one of the characters in this one. Not for school, just because I loved it so much. Although I didn't hesitate to submit it for a poetry assignment either, because I'm lazy like that.
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 - I seem to recall this book breaking my heart, once upon a time.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - I LOVE what little of the Sherlock Holmes stuff I've read, but it isn't much.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - One of my favourite books of ALL TIME.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - LOL CAN I COUNT REDWALL HERE? Okay, no.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - Just shortened versions, I think.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - This is No. 1 on my list of his tragedies - I own it - and yet somehow every time I go to read it, I get pulled away from it.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Buuut...I liked Matilda better.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Okay...I repeat:
-Where is Poe?
-Where are...several sci-fi authors I can think of? If the Guide is on here, why not Ender's Game? Why not Stranger in a Strange Land? Those are seminal works. Well, the latter is, anyway.
-If Dracula is on here, why not Frankenstein? (Female author? *cough*) They both HUGELY influenced the horror genre, and the latter also had a strong influence on science fiction. The latter is FREQUENTLY left off these sorts of lists. Hmm.
-If this list is for Americans...hmm. Where is Toni Morrison?
-If 74 (at least) is non-fiction, where is, say, The Diary of Anne Frank?
ARRGH. Lists like this always frustrate the crap out of me.
I'm waiting for my juice to get cold, which is annoying. I hate drinking things which aren't either HOT or COLD. We have cold drinking water in the fridge, but I don't want to use it up.