The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
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) Put an asterick next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read
5) 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 * (Started, no way can I finish, I do not understand what the big deal about Jane Austen is AT ALL.)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien * (See above for Jane Austen)
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 (Loathe and detest this book so much, though I've had to read it three fricking times for various classes)
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 (Though I'll admit it's been a very long time since I read it.)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens * (Dickens bores me to tears.)
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 (This was my introduction to Russian literature, and I love this book to pieces.)
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 (I mentioned my love of Russian literature, right?)
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (Hate so much)
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen * (Absolutely, 100% not)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen * (Am I going to have to repeat how much I loathe Austen every time she shows up on the damn list?)
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Why is this separate from the series?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - (I own this, and it's buried in my TBR pile somewhere.)
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 (Another one I own, buried somewhere in my house)
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (My introduction to Atwood. Love her.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Somewhere inside my house...)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (The series fell apart eventually, but the first book changed how I read a lot of literature.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons (Another sitting on my TBR pile)
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen * (Nope. Not even though I loved the movie to pieces.)
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (It bugs me that I've read so many books by an author I can't stand. Ah, the joys of too many lit classes.)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Ohmigod, I *just* put this book on my wishlist at Amazon.)
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 (I got addicted to Bryson when I moved to the UK, and devoured everything he had written in the space of just a couple months. He's brilliant.)
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (Doesn't every girl in an emo phase read this?)
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (Craig has this book and loves it. He keeps bugging me to read it.)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (I don't actually hate this one as much as his other work. That's probably the sentimental side of me coming through.)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (Oh, seeing this here makes me want to go dig it out of my TBR pile. I've had this for years and have never gotten around to reading it.)
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White (How can anyone read this and not love it?)
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 (And thus started my love affair with Dahl.)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I think it's rather telling I love so many of the really long books on this list, lol.
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Comments
I guess that's about all I can add. *g*
I've heard mixed things about "Atonement." I think that's why I haven't jumped to read it.
My TBR pile is scary. I've made the mistake in recent years - and again this year - to get a book rec day-by-day calendar. I bought a lot of what looked interesting in this past, though this year I'm being smarter and just putting stuff on my wishlist for buying at a later date.
'The Secret History' is fantastic. And, honestly, so is 'Atonement'. I mean, McEwan is incredibly smart and his prose is dense...but the book is just so compelling and ultimately heart-wrenching. I loved it...once I got past those first 75 pages!
If I can dig up my copy, would you like it?
You would do that? I would be soooooooo grateful! Thank you!
And thank you again!
just my 2 cents =)
Thank you for the recs, though! :)