Trying to wake up over here. LOL. Long night. Anyway, I stole this from Moonrat's blog (she stole it from someone else. LOL) Anyway -- thought I'd give it a go.
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. (To speed this along, I only italicized the ones I currently have in my TBR pile. There are others I'd like to read, but well, I haven't handed over my duckets yet.)
3) Underline the books you LOVE. (Skipping this one altogether, because I can't figure out how to do it on blogger.)
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 (Close enough, anyway)
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
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
If I counted correctly, I've read 38. Waaay above average, but still NOT good enough. (g) Need to get crackin'.
12 comments:
Well, I tagged myself off this one. Couldn't pass it up. (g)
I've got approximately 46 (my eyes keep blurring when scrolling up to count - need to change the background color on my blog!)
Tara,
You beat me! HRM. (g) I'm thinking of seeing if I can make it through the rest of the list -- granted, it would take me a while. LOL.
Jen
Well, I think you should work on FI, first! (eg)
I would love to RE-READ a lot of these - it's been years for most of them.
Tara,
Haha...yes. I was thinking about how some of these books were read TO ME -- it's been that long. (g)
And yes...FI first. I've procrastinated in every possible way today -- went to the library, got lunch, did the Big Read list, set up a Shelfari after seeing one on your blog... LOL. I'm pathetic.
Jen
Hehe - I spent most of the day yesterday (and night) checking out www.mansonfamilytoday.com instead of writing! Procrastinators, unite! (g)
I have always had the oddest fascination with that case - can't explain it - even though it happened 3 years before I was born.
Tara,
OMG, me too! LOL. I did a HUGE project in 7th or 8th grade about them. If I had been my teacher, I think I may have been a little freaked out. (g) I think I get it from my mom -- she always wanted to move to California because that was where all the murders were. Heh. She was pretty green-eyed when I wanted to join the FBI...possibly the reason she dug FI. Gives her a little taste of the action. (g)
Jen
Dude, this is too weird. I majored in Criminology in order to join the FBI!
I wanted to join Behavioral Sciences (until they disbanded it), mainly due to Manson and Ted Bundy - both of my "obsessions" back then.
I hope to hell you are going to Surrey this year - I think I've found my drinking buddy! (eg)
It's because of my background (and your sparkling wit, of course) that I was drawn to your story when I first joined the forum.
dude!!! 38's pretty good!!
Moonrat,
Says the girl who has read 60+. (VBG) I feel so behind. LOL.
Jen
Tara,
I WISH I was going to Surrey this year. LOL. I doubt it, tho...Jen has zero deniro. :) Maybe next year. You'll have to say hello to all the forumites for me -- including *cough*D.A.*cough*. (g)
Jen
No way! Your D.A. is going to be there and you can't?? There is NO justice! (bg)
You'll have to tell me who they are so that I can (cough) convince people to walk by and (cough) mention that stories about narcs are ALL the rage, and the authors of those stories should be receiving loads of advances, trips to Surrey, etc.
(g)
LOVE this post, because lists are almost always great for discussion purposes. I followed the links to figure out where the list came from. Was wondering what the criteria was. Most of the books are definitely classics, especially those older books that have withstood the test of time.
But I saw some new books on there that made me say, "Huh?" I'm sure they are good, but I think it's too early to tell yet if they will be classics.
I also wondered if there was any order to the list. While I adore Jane Eyre, I've not yet read Wuthering Heights, and just heard a college lecture in which the professor informed us that critics regard WH as superior. Why? Who knows! I actually bought it and am about to read it.
FUN!!!
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