baa baa book meme

[rose_griffes]

One of those book memes... recently seen chez verdantpine and helen_c

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ

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 Mockbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman enjoyed until the end of the third book... bleurgh
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 never heard of it
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 REALLY? I'm supposed to read this?! WHY?!
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins never heard of it
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy I think one book by Hardy was enough
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding don't remember much
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 they really like Austen on this list, eh?
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth okay, now we're getting to several I haven't heard of
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley I don't really remember it, though
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 *bawls just thinking about it*
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 will never read this, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' was frustrating enough
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


So why did they group all of the Lord of the Rings books together in one but not the Narnia series? Why is the complete works of Shakespeare near the top and then Hamlet listed separately near the end? Who or what is 'The Big Read'? (heh, possibly I should find these things out before following everyone else like a sheep and posting a meme.)

Comments

[pataka02.livejournal.com]

75 Ulysses - James Joyce will never read this, 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' was frustrating enough

Ha! Yes, thank you. I loathe "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" and found it one of the most frustrating reads ever.

Also, this list does seem a little random... what with Hamlet separated from the Complete Works, and what happens when you've read some of or most of something? Like I've read a considerable amount of Shakespeare but am probably missing a couple of the histories and I'm sure some of the sonnets. Dude wrote a lot. Heh.

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

I had to read Portrait of the Artist for my senior year of English. Gah, I was so glad to be done with it.

I've read a considerable amount of Shakespeare but am probably missing a couple of the histories and I'm sure some of the sonnets. Dude wrote a lot. Heh.

Exactly! I've read quite a bit of Shakespeare, but not everything...

[pataka02.livejournal.com]

Ooo, I had to read it senior year of English in high school as well... and I made sure my teacher knew I was suffering through it. Hehe.

[helen-c.livejournal.com]

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown REALLY? I'm supposed to read this?! WHY?!
My thoughts exactly... :D

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Yeah, why Dan Brown and no Ann Tyler? Lots of better books out there that could have been chosen...

[frolicndetour.livejournal.com]

REALLY? I'm supposed to read this?! WHY?!

Don't do it Rose! I read it, but I despised myself more with every turn of the page.

Also, the five people you meet in heaven? Isn't that by the guy who wrote Tuesdays With Maury? Because I read that as a teenager and it still felt smarmy and gross.

Bridget Jones Diary is another odd one. I enjoyed the book certainly, but no one's life will be incomplete if they don't read it. Hmph! Clearly these people know nothing and I still don't have to read War and Peace! ;)

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

Don't worry, I have no intention of reading The Da Vinci Code... the movie was cheesetastically fun (and immensely forgettable in spite of Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou), but the author put me off the idea of ever reading the book with his smarmy interview answers.

Yeah, Bridget Jones' Diary is an odd one. Actually there are several books I wouldn't have put on the list.

[(Anonymous)]

An interesting meme, but it doesn't seem to be the exact list (the Big Read was a survey by the BBC asking about the UK's favorite book). The full list can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Read

There's also an organization called The Big Read that's part of the National Endowment for the Arts.

Elizabeth

[rose-griffes.livejournal.com]

I found the NEA site and didn't think to look any further. I actually didn't find any list on the NEA's site, but I didn't have the time to look very hard... Anyway, there are a couple of books on the list (The Great Gatsby in particular) that I may try to read this summer).

Thanks for the link about the BBC list.