From ktbuffy via jayananda:
The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, *or not, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. (SEE UPDATE BELOW)
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Asterisk (*) the books you LOVE.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman $#%&!@
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
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
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
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 Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
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
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
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
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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I added another category - an ! in front of books that I started and either hated or they didn't hold my interest, so I didn't finish them. (In the case of #66 and #43, I got at least 3/4 of the way through and just dropped them.) I've been told to give #82 a second chance, and maybe I will. I think I was too young to appreciate #57 when I tried to read it- maybe it deserves a second chance, maybe on audio.
I also added a string of symbols after #9, which I did finish, and was so disappointed in that I was angry at the author and the time I wasted. Those symbols don't mean anything; I'm cursing Phillip Pullman out.
So, I've read 28 of them. Not bad, I guess, for a future librarian. How'd you do?
*- after Bob pointed out that I didn't post #44 and #51, I did some research to find them and cannot discover who made this list. It seems to be based on the list of the BBC's The Big Read, not the National Endowment for the Art's Big Read, which is an entirely different project. I did, however, find some posts with a complete list so I added those books back. So, it's not really based on an NEA project, but it's certainly someone's idea of fun. Still cool, huh?
If anyone finds proof that it's an NEA project, let me know and I'll correct again.
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14 comments:
Let's see I know I read some of these, but I can't remember all of them. I do have a list of classics I should read so I have good
intentions. That should count for something, right? :)
Thirty-five. I'm a huge Jane Austen fan, that helped. Also, I went on a "classics spree" a few years back, because I figured they must be good reads if people call them classics. That's how I found out that I hate reading Melville.
And I completely agree with you about "His Dark Materials". Who gave that man awards for that drek?
Where are #44 and 51?
I think it's cool that you added a mark for "hated it." I thought about that after I did mine, 'cause yeah, I read'em, but did I like'em? Nope. (I am referring to "Wuthering Heights," "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "The Great Gatsby," "Grapes of Wrath" and "A Confederacy of Dunces.") Although it's possible that, like you, I was just too young when I read a couple of them.
Wow, Bob, I totally missed that. My bad. I'll find 'em, note 'em and re-add 'em.
I've read 35 of them also. Don't read as much as I used to. After writing all day, I don't feel like reading.
Why is the The Chronicles of Narnia separate from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
Jaya -- you hated The Great Gatsby? And The Grapes of Wrath?
This troubles me.
More troubling, even, than Sharon's hate of A Tale of Two Cities, because everyone hates that until it suddenly--inexplicably--becomes crack.
Rob, that's why I think I might try it again. I had to read it for a class in high school, and it was just another long boring book that was a chore for me. I fudged it on cliff notes. I wonder if there's a good audio of it somewhere.
Check the library - the copy of A TALE OF TWO CITIES on cassette they has was well read by someone famous - can't remember now who (not Scott Brick!).
Thanks to Books on Tape/CD (and a catholic school education)- 58.
I've read a lot of those books, & I have little interest in reading the ones I haven't read. I've never read a Jane Austen novel, although between high school & college I don't know how I managed to avoid it.
Me neither- no Jane Austen. It's never thought it was a gaping hole in my education, but it does seem to be a missing link when I see lists like this.
I've read thirty-five, too! I'm working on Ulysses now. I recently started Middlemarch and gave it up when someone said they gave it up. It was slow going. I'm not always sure if it pays to stick it out. Anyone finish Middlemarch and were glad for it out there? I need some really heartening enthusiasm to get back into it.
I haven't read Middlemarch, so I can't comment specifically on that book- but it's funny, for the longest time I always finished books, even if I didn't like them. I always felt obligated. (Of the few I didn't finish in that time period, most are on this list.) In the last couple of years, however, I got over it. There is just too much to read and too much good out there to make myself finish something I'm not enjoying.
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