Book list from everyone
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
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 so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Everything she writes is brilliant)
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 (not all but most)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (probably my favorite Dickens, Pip may be the only truly flawed Dickens hero)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (in general I avoid Hardy like the plague)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Many 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 (I'm about 80 pages from the end I need to just finish it! I forget what "shiny" distracted me from finishing it)
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 (One of my all time favorites!)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (My favorite Austen)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this redundant with #33?)
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 (I tried to read Anne of Avonlea but I couldn't take the excess sugar, but the first book is lovely)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (This may be the only Hardy I like)
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 (Hate this one, and I've had to read it twice for school)
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 (Hardy bad!!!)
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (I've read parts of it)
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
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 (I've read "The Hounds of the Baskervilles")
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 (isn't this redundant with #14?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (duh!)
Final score: 25 out of 100, and I really need to finish some of these!
Other book I've read that should be on this list, as I believe they are classics in their genres (underlines are favorites):
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell (well I'm not quite done reading it)
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
Jekyll and Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
The Black Cauldron - Lloyd Alexander
The High King - Lloyd Alexander
The Emigrant Novels - Vilhelm Moberg
The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott (I still have another 100 pages)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Hedi - Johanna Spyri
My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
The Phamtom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
I considered adding Gaskell's "North and South" but it's not her strongest work, as much as I love it. Then Lloyd Alexanders Westmark books are excellent but not as well known as the Prydain ones. Then all Austen's minor works are wonderful. 'The Scarlet Pimpernal' is fun but maybe not quite the level of some of these others
Which brings me to my final point ...
Who is "The Big Read" and what make them qualified to put together a list of what is the greatest of books/plays? Honestly!! Where's one work by Henry James, Willa Cather, Dante, Mark Twain, Edger Allan Poe? But they include Helen Fielding, and Dan Brown!!?
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 so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Everything she writes is brilliant)
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 (not all but most)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (probably my favorite Dickens, Pip may be the only truly flawed Dickens hero)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (in general I avoid Hardy like the plague)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Many 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 (I'm about 80 pages from the end I need to just finish it! I forget what "shiny" distracted me from finishing it)
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 (One of my all time favorites!)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (My favorite Austen)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (isn't this redundant with #33?)
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 (I tried to read Anne of Avonlea but I couldn't take the excess sugar, but the first book is lovely)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (This may be the only Hardy I like)
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 (Hate this one, and I've had to read it twice for school)
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 (Hardy bad!!!)
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (I've read parts of it)
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
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 (I've read "The Hounds of the Baskervilles")
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 (isn't this redundant with #14?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (duh!)
Final score: 25 out of 100, and I really need to finish some of these!
Other book I've read that should be on this list, as I believe they are classics in their genres (underlines are favorites):
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Cranford - Elizabeth Gaskell (well I'm not quite done reading it)
Frankenstein - Mary Shelly
Jekyll and Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
The Black Cauldron - Lloyd Alexander
The High King - Lloyd Alexander
The Emigrant Novels - Vilhelm Moberg
The Jewel in the Crown - Paul Scott (I still have another 100 pages)
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
A Separate Peace - John Knowles
Hedi - Johanna Spyri
My Name is Asher Lev - Chaim Potok
Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes
The Phamtom of the Opera - Gaston Leroux
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
Pygmalion - George Bernard Shaw
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
I considered adding Gaskell's "North and South" but it's not her strongest work, as much as I love it. Then Lloyd Alexanders Westmark books are excellent but not as well known as the Prydain ones. Then all Austen's minor works are wonderful. 'The Scarlet Pimpernal' is fun but maybe not quite the level of some of these others
Which brings me to my final point ...
Who is "The Big Read" and what make them qualified to put together a list of what is the greatest of books/plays? Honestly!! Where's one work by Henry James, Willa Cather, Dante, Mark Twain, Edger Allan Poe? But they include Helen Fielding, and Dan Brown!!?