The Big Read List
I tried to avoid this, but it was probably inevitable. It's about books, so I was bound to give in sooner or later.
From EVERYONE:
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. I know I can do better than that, but I’m not particularly average when it comes to reading. I’m a librarian. That’s got to mean something.
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 only read 6 and force books upon them, as
earlgreytea68 said! ;-)
41 total for me. Not too shabby.
There are so many books on here I’ve never heard of, and so many I love that are missing. There are also a lot I've seen or heard about and decided I didn't want to read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -I admit it, I liked the movie better.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte -Austen is better, thanks. This was just weird.
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee -Why, why did she stop at ONE book?
6 The Bible -err... you don’t mean all the way through, right? I know the stories!
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -Any book that has the word wuthering in the title goes on my list!
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -didn’t like them the first time, loved them the second.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - One of my favorites EVER. And all her other books, except for the weird early years, and I’ve read some of those too.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - I know the story, don’t need to read it. Everyone else I knew was in British Lit one year and talked about it at lunch in high school. Ugh.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller -I’m sure I read it, can’t remember it though!
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- All of them? Who's read all of them?! (Besides Shakespeare scholars.) Not happening any time soon!
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 -I really need to read this one.
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell -Scarlett pissed me off.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -All thanks to British Detective Fiction. A fun class, even if I got a B.
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 -another one I hated the first time but liked the second. Now I don’t care for it much anymore, after my teacher tried to convince us a turtle was a phallic symbol.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll -I’m afraid I’ve only seen the Disney movie.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -My first beloved fantasy series.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -er, does this count twice? It’s part of the Chronicles. Weird.
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 -my mom has it in Latin. I read it in English, though.
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 -again, thanks to Brit Det. Fic.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery -And all the other books she wrote. Again and again and again.
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
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert -Loved the first one, couldn’t stand the rest.
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 - I’ve heard good things.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon -quite good; don’t know if I love it. A bit too depressing, but wonderfully written.
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -ugh. Steinbeck. Just his name makes me tired.
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas -The movie has the happier ending.
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 -No, but I know the songs from the musical!
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -Oh, I read this so many times!
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 -Beautiful imagery.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -Probably too many times, but I love it.
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 -The only time I felt bad for a spider.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle -I love them so much!
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 -I think I may have read the abridged version though.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -I did manage this one, but I’d rather read the comedies.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo