That book meme that's making the rounds

[ciroccoj]

(Yes, deja vu from my other lj)

So there's a meme going around about the top 100 books that were voted people's favourites in the Big Read done by the BBC a few years ago. The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Chris believes this to be accurate, and furthermore believes that the average adult has only read 6 books, period. Chris is not a big fan of humans.


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
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - Was only able to read through this after watching the movies and reading up on just what it was Tolkien was trying to do when he wrote the books. Glad I did it. Fine works of literature. Will not read them again.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - No comment needed here, I don't think ;)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee I recently started to re-read this one for the six or seventh time and am once again blown away by the beauty of it
6. The Bible (or bits of it, anyway) Have read Genesis and Exodus, much of Leviticus and Numbers, and Ruth. And the four Gospels. Keep meaning to read the rest.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - Doesn't count if you read the Coles notes because it was required reading for English and you just couldn't slog through one more page of the real thing, does it?
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Read in grade six, too early.
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - I didn't love it, but I may be one of two people in the English language who actually liked it
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Currently re-reading Little Men :)
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 - Mostly want to read this because of Six Degrees of Separation ;)
19. The Time Traveler'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 - My current sigfile is from this book :)
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 - It's history!crack! AKA Foucault's Pendulum-Lite.
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I tried, OH MY GOD I tried, and I don't think I failed just because I was reading it in Spanish. I feel like a bad Latin American, but just simply cannot make myself finish this book.
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Just re-read with my kids!
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 ::love::
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 - Also read in grade six. Was also probably too young.
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - After 100 Years, I couldn't even make myself start this one. Bad, bad Latin American
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Wouldn't have read it if it hadn't been required reading for English. So glad it was :)
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 - Read the Illustrated Classics version, don't think it counts. But hey, at least now I get the quotes in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan!
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 - What a totally gorgeous book. I'm an atheist, but the concept of God here is what I would believe in, if I believed in God.
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

You know, I really wish more of these were italicised. There are so many that I feel that, as a well-rounded and educated individual, I should ought to read. But I'm 37 now. I think I'm finally beginning to accept that I am just simply not as well-rounded and educated an individual as I once thought I would be, and it doesn't particularly bother me any more.

Comments

[fearciuil.livejournal.com]

According to E. Paul Torrance, one of the pioneers in the field of creativity (yes, it's a field), well-roundedness is overrated. And if you don't believe me, look up "Torrance" and "Beyonders" (that's his term for those who ... well, go beyond their peers. But you figured that out on your own, I'm sure.)

Am now skipping off to put this meme in my journal ... (and most memes don't interest me)....

[ladystarstruck.livejournal.com]

Don't waste more time only meaning to read His Dark Materials! Get them now! I'd love them more than Harry Potter if I'd discovered them first. All the good aspects of Harry Potter, and better writing style.

PS What other LJ?

[ladystarstruck.livejournal.com]

Bleh, did the whole meme in Word, but can't cut and paste all the bolding etc into LJ, so it goes unread. Like many books. Suffice to say, I've read more than 6, but at only 28 I guess I have a lot of rounding to do too.

A good number of those are 'classic' children's books, and I was a busy child. Some others are only bolded because I had to read them in school, and I never would have otherwise. Also nice to see some recent works on there too; I wonder what they bumped off to make room since the last time this meme circulated?

And what's with the 33&36 and 14&98 pairings? Kinda freebies there.

[fe2h2o.livejournal.com]

I'd recommend the Swallows and Amazons as a read aloud with your kids (although, they would probably be quite happy to read them themselves). I _think_ I first read them in my 20s, and I love them:-)