Book meme via libwitch
I haven't done one of these in a while, so I'll bite. Not that I suspect I know all that many "average adults."
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.
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 ;-)
5)Annotate at will.
Ok, how do you make a list like this and include The Da Vinci Code, but exclude both The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame??
UPDATE: In agreement that this is a really, really weird list, I took a moment to see if I could locate a primary source. I found a few different lists, as well as an explanation. The Big Read was a BBC search for the nation's most beloved books. It was conducted by simply asking people to send in the names of their favorite books. Neither list in the above two links quite matches the list I got from libwitch (which I've just noticed is two shy of 100), but they are similar enough to call it the same source. So yeah, it was a popularity contest, held in 2003. That explains both The Da Vinci Code and The Lovely Bones. (The latter was an Oprah Book Club book a few years earlier.)
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.
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 ;-)
5)Annotate at will.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien.
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bront&eunl; (Tried once, got distracted and forgot about it. Seems like something I ought to have read, though.)
- Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell (Wrote a comaprative paper on this book's and Brave New World's depictions of love in high school.)
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare (This seems a little unfair to include, given that it's 36 or so plays, plus all the poetry. I have read quite a few of his plays, but not all of them.)
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier Exceptional book. I was also very impressed with the movie adaptation.
- The Hobbit
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I hated this book when I was 15, and couldn't fathom why the author expected me to care about Holden when I attempted to give it another chance a few years ago.)
- The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald (Meh.)
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I haven't read it in a few years, but I read it about 8 million times in high school.)
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
- Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Gramahe (I watched the cartoon movie incessantly as a child, but I don't think I ever actually read the book.)
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis (libwitch makes an excellent point: it is silly to include both a series and a single book from said series in a list of this sort.)
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh - Milne
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Dune - Frank Herbert (Nik advised me not to read the rest of the series. By all accounts, I'm happier for it.)
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Full disclosure: I still haven't gotten around to reading the full book. The book I read was an abridgement that gave no indication it was abridged. B says I didn't miss much.)
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Dracula - Bram Stoker (Read it in 6th or 7th grade and totally loved it.)
- The Secret Garden
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Meant to read it. had B's copy for months before acknowledging I wasn't likely to get to it any time soon.)
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte's Web - EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (I think I got through the first two discs before deciding that it was unreadable dreck.)
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I read quite a few of his adventures, but not all of them.)
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (This may very well be my all-time favorite book. I've read it in the origial French several times.)
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Again with the inclusion of both a complete works and a single volume from said works.)
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Ok, how do you make a list like this and include The Da Vinci Code, but exclude both The Scarlet Pimpernel and The Hunchback of Nôtre-Dame??
UPDATE: In agreement that this is a really, really weird list, I took a moment to see if I could locate a primary source. I found a few different lists, as well as an explanation. The Big Read was a BBC search for the nation's most beloved books. It was conducted by simply asking people to send in the names of their favorite books. Neither list in the above two links quite matches the list I got from libwitch (which I've just noticed is two shy of 100), but they are similar enough to call it the same source. So yeah, it was a popularity contest, held in 2003. That explains both The Da Vinci Code and The Lovely Bones. (The latter was an Oprah Book Club book a few years earlier.)