Poeia (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} poeia) wrote,@ 2008-06-27 18:33:00 |
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The Big Read Meme
I tend to think I’m “illiterate” in that I haven’t read enough of the books that any literate person should. If this list is the benchmark, then I’m actually semi-illiterate. There are several books on this list that I gave away this week because I finally acknowledged that I was never going to read them.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
Snagged from T’eyla
I tend to think I’m “illiterate” in that I haven’t read enough of the books that any literate person should. If this list is the benchmark, then I’m actually semi-illiterate. There are several books on this list that I gave away this week because I finally acknowledged that I was never going to read them.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
Snagged from T’eyla
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 (The first book only. I hated it.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (The first book only. I didn’t hate it.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7Wuthering Heights
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 (I’ve read a dozen or so plays and some of the sonnets.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I really liked this. That’s why I tackled the trilogy. Big mistake.)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I just gave this away)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I have my mother’s copy from the 1930s. Great storytelling, but the racism is very disturbing.)
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* (see footnote)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (Haven’t finished it. But I didn’t give it away so there’s still hope.)
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 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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 (Read part of it. I’m not a Dickens fan and I particularly don’t like this one.)
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 (I’ve read parts of it.)
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 (This one I’ll never give away.)
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 (I just gave this away)
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 (I think I’ve read it. I’ve read a lot of Holmes, but not all of it. But I’m pretty sure I’ve read the 12 stories in this anthology.)
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 (I’m not sure why this is separate from the complete works, but it’s my favorite of all his plays.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
*When I was a kid, my mother decided my sister and I should read Wind in the Willows. I don’t remember why, but we both refused. So she took it out of the library on a record. We wouldn’t listen to it. Finally she set up the record player on a chair in the hall between our rooms and turned it on when we went to bed. My father told her he thought we were trying to tell her something – we were both in bed with our pillows clamped over our ears. I still haven’t read it. I wonder if my sister has.
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 (The first book only. I hated it.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (The first book only. I didn’t hate it.)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7
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 (I’ve read a dozen or so plays and some of the sonnets.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (I really liked this. That’s why I tackled the trilogy. Big mistake.)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I just gave this away)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I have my mother’s copy from the 1930s. Great storytelling, but the racism is very disturbing.)
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* (see footnote)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (Haven’t finished it. But I didn’t give it away so there’s still hope.)
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 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
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 (Read part of it. I’m not a Dickens fan and I particularly don’t like this one.)
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 (I’ve read parts of it.)
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 (This one I’ll never give away.)
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 (I just gave this away)
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 (I think I’ve read it. I’ve read a lot of Holmes, but not all of it. But I’m pretty sure I’ve read the 12 stories in this anthology.)
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 (I’m not sure why this is separate from the complete works, but it’s my favorite of all his plays.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
*When I was a kid, my mother decided my sister and I should read Wind in the Willows. I don’t remember why, but we both refused. So she took it out of the library on a record. We wouldn’t listen to it. Finally she set up the record player on a chair in the hall between our rooms and turned it on when we went to bed. My father told her he thought we were trying to tell her something – we were both in bed with our pillows clamped over our ears. I still haven’t read it. I wonder if my sister has.
