Book Meme
Please. This meme was made for me :D
"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. I'm going to do them in RED
2) Italicize those you intend to read. I'm going to do them in BLUE
NOTE: These books are probably books I own, but haven't read yet.
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 I know! I'm the worst English major ever! I have yet to read this book
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 Seriously, one of the best books ever.
6 The Bible I was a Catholic for 14 years. It counts.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott One of the first instances of Chick Lit in the United States.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Okay, but I haven't read ALL of them, but I've read a LOT 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 My copy is a family heirloom. It was my grandmother's--she got it when she was 11 (it's a first edition, third printing). She passed it down to my mom, and my mom passed it down to me. I haven't read the whole book, but I have read parts of it. The ending of the book TOTALLY kicks the ending of the movie's ASS!!
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald I love this book so much I'm going to name my dogs Daisy and Gatsby.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker'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 I have a strong feeling I'm going to have to read this in my Women and Madness in Literature class
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
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding THIS IS SERIOUSLY TORTURE TO READ. CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT, IT IS!!!!
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
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 Chick Lit, patient zero
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 Absolutely magical. This book is the reason I love Christmas so much.
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
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 Hamlet is a whiny little bitch. He really just needs to get over himself two acts sooner and kick some ass!!!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total Read: 18
Want to Read: 27
The funny thing, I used to HATE literature from the 19th century (too much description) until my favorite teacher ever explained something to me (keep in mind, the woman is 100 pages away from having a Ph.D in 19th Century Transatlantic Literature). She said:
"You have to keep in mind, people in those days didn't have the same general base of knowledge that we do. We know what London looks like from movies, but people back then didn't know what London looked like unless they lived there. So that's why there's all that description: they were putting EVERYTHING they saw into words so people could get that picture."
And from then on, I loved 19th century literature.
But here's my soapbox rant:
So WHAT if you haven't read six of these books? That doesn't make anything you've read have any less merit. As long as you read SOMETHING, it counts. My favorite book in the entire world is a fairly obscure children's book called Bloomability. I LOVE the Alice Series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. And just because something isn't a classic doesn't mean that you can't learn from it--authors of chick lit and mystery research their books as much as Pulitzer award winning authors do.
I hate this stigma that says that you have to read classics in order to be well-read. I spend a LOT of time defending my book choices to people. I love girly novels, okay? I love my bright pink covers, my sugary love plots, and unrealistically hot love interests. And just because romance happens to be the main plot DOESN'T mean that it's drivel, okay? My favorite heroines (Heather Wells, Stephanie Plum) can teach me JUST as much as Hamlet or Atticus can. Meg Cabot wrote her Heather Wells series (chick lit mystery at its finest, if I do say so myself) because she wanted to show women that size doesn't matter. In today's world, isn't that an important a message to get across to young women?
Oprah and the Pulitzer committee do NOT decide what good literature is. YOU do. If you want to read Twilight instead of Dracula, please, by all means, do so. At least you're reading. There are some authors that I really don't like. But I will NEVER criticize someone or laugh at someone for what they're reading (no matter how silly it seems), because you know what? At least they're reading.
*hops off soapbox*
Librarian really is the only logical career path for me.
"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. I'm going to do them in RED
2) Italicize those you intend to read. I'm going to do them in BLUE
NOTE: These books are probably books I own, but haven't read yet.
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 I know! I'm the worst English major ever! I have yet to read this book
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 Seriously, one of the best books ever.
6 The Bible I was a Catholic for 14 years. It counts.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott One of the first instances of Chick Lit in the United States.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare Okay, but I haven't read ALL of them, but I've read a LOT 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 My copy is a family heirloom. It was my grandmother's--she got it when she was 11 (it's a first edition, third printing). She passed it down to my mom, and my mom passed it down to me. I haven't read the whole book, but I have read parts of it. The ending of the book TOTALLY kicks the ending of the movie's ASS!!
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald I love this book so much I'm going to name my dogs Daisy and Gatsby.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker'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 I have a strong feeling I'm going to have to read this in my Women and Madness in Literature class
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
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding THIS IS SERIOUSLY TORTURE TO READ. CRUEL AND UNUSUAL PUNISHMENT, IT IS!!!!
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
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 Chick Lit, patient zero
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 Absolutely magical. This book is the reason I love Christmas so much.
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
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 Hamlet is a whiny little bitch. He really just needs to get over himself two acts sooner and kick some ass!!!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total Read: 18
Want to Read: 27
The funny thing, I used to HATE literature from the 19th century (too much description) until my favorite teacher ever explained something to me (keep in mind, the woman is 100 pages away from having a Ph.D in 19th Century Transatlantic Literature). She said:
"You have to keep in mind, people in those days didn't have the same general base of knowledge that we do. We know what London looks like from movies, but people back then didn't know what London looked like unless they lived there. So that's why there's all that description: they were putting EVERYTHING they saw into words so people could get that picture."
And from then on, I loved 19th century literature.
But here's my soapbox rant:
So WHAT if you haven't read six of these books? That doesn't make anything you've read have any less merit. As long as you read SOMETHING, it counts. My favorite book in the entire world is a fairly obscure children's book called Bloomability. I LOVE the Alice Series by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor. And just because something isn't a classic doesn't mean that you can't learn from it--authors of chick lit and mystery research their books as much as Pulitzer award winning authors do.
I hate this stigma that says that you have to read classics in order to be well-read. I spend a LOT of time defending my book choices to people. I love girly novels, okay? I love my bright pink covers, my sugary love plots, and unrealistically hot love interests. And just because romance happens to be the main plot DOESN'T mean that it's drivel, okay? My favorite heroines (Heather Wells, Stephanie Plum) can teach me JUST as much as Hamlet or Atticus can. Meg Cabot wrote her Heather Wells series (chick lit mystery at its finest, if I do say so myself) because she wanted to show women that size doesn't matter. In today's world, isn't that an important a message to get across to young women?
Oprah and the Pulitzer committee do NOT decide what good literature is. YOU do. If you want to read Twilight instead of Dracula, please, by all means, do so. At least you're reading. There are some authors that I really don't like. But I will NEVER criticize someone or laugh at someone for what they're reading (no matter how silly it seems), because you know what? At least they're reading.
*hops off soapbox*
Librarian really is the only logical career path for me.