I have nicked this from Amanda Ashby.
The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. How do you do?
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. -- I am not going to do this as I only was intending to procrastinate a little.
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
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
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
Out of the 100 possible, I have read 85. Although in some ways, there are two duplicates --Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet as well as Chronicles of Narnia and TLTWTW.
And I did not major in English Literature at university so I do not have that as an excuse. I simply like to read and I went through a stage of reading The Classics. I am curious though on who chose the list.
It is interesting that most American adults have only read 6 books on the list. I would imagine writers generally score higher.
6 comments:
I did it and have it set to go for tomorrow's post. HOWEVER you kicked my butt. I have only read 29. I cannot seem to wade my way through Dickens.
It was interesting to me though how many I have seen either in film or BBC dramatisations that I haven't read...
Ah well, when I was about 13 my grandparents gave me a complete set of Dickens. It made things easier. And then I became interested in Tolstoy so I read Anna Karennia and then War and Peace. That sort of thing.
Les Miserables I read because I kept encountering references to it. It was a popular book during the American Civil War -- Lee's Miserables. So when I finally saw the musical I was like -- oh they have changed this and that.
And at one point it was on Masterpiece theatre, I tried to make a point of reading the book as then it could not be banned.
I made it to 40.
I plan on reading A Tale of Two Cities this summer -- one of the few Dickens I haven't read. Donna, I can see why his books could be a turn-off. His women characters are a problem for me -- not very realistic in many cases.
LOL I remember trying to read a Dickens while pregnant. I would read three pages, and fall asleep. I know, that's horrid.
Right now I'm not too worried about my list...I have a teetering tbr to concern myself with! And didn't I go and order more books today....
I got to 45. I never did read the things I was supposed to read, only those that appealed to me. And I did English at uni! Anyway, I won't hang my head in shame - I've read some pretty interesting books in my time even if they are not on the list.
I've nicked this from you, and I have similar rants :o)
I had a big thing about European literature in my late teens - Russian, German, French and Italian. And as my degree was Eng Lit, I had to read the classics. (My loathing of Austen stems from that date. Mansfield tedious Park.)
Donna, that's hilarious. Little Dorrit is the book I used as a student to put me to sleep when I'd worked too late at night and I was tired but my mind was buzzing too much for sleep. Worked like a charm. (Dickens' best female character for me is Mrs Dombey. Though George Moore would have handled her better.)
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