Book Meme

[tartysuz]

From kadymae, via Caly:

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either.

BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. 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'Ubervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read about half the plays and a bunch of the sonnets)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 Hitchhiker'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
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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

Comments

[bossymarmalade.livejournal.com]

if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average

I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THIS OR I WILL WEEP ENDLESSLY FOR (literate) HUMANITY

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

I know! And just to depress you more, ONE OF THOSE COULD BE DAN BROWN.

[chibifrieza.livejournal.com]

On a quick scan, I'm pretty sure I've read over forty of these, and started several others. SEVEN? That is APPALLING. *_* And, as you say, ONE OF THOSE COULD BE DAN BROWN. DX And, like, Bridget Jones's Diary is not exactly what I would call art, you know? I dunno.

On a slightly related note, I think Watership Down is possibly my favourite book ever. I realised that I read it far more often than I do LotR, which is mostly because LotR is a commitment and I don't own it in portable paperback, but still. They're at least among the top five, all in a cloud without clear dominance or something, okay? :P The Last Unicorn is also up there. I feel that The Last Unicorn should be on this list, but, well. One can't have everything.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

Jane Austen is my favourite author, so I've read all of her books, and she's over-represented on this list. So is Charles Dickens. I do re-read Austen but not Dickens: other than Hard Times, he's tl;dr-r (too long; didn't re-read)!

[chibifrieza.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the Austen helped me out, too. And the Brontës. I have to admit, despite having been given Great Expectations for Christmas a great many years ago, I haven't ever finished any Dickens except for A Christmas Carol....

[rpm45.livejournal.com]

I think I've read a dozen of these (ignoring the ones I'd italicize). Mostly overlap with yours, though I've also read the Harry Potter and Narnia series.

I'm actually surprised the total is as high as seven. These are great books (by which I mean either "really good", "really important", or both) but there are a lot of great books that didn't make the list, and a lot of the books on here are really tough to read (by which I mean "really bad", "really challenging", "really old (meaning style or value difference issues)", or other reasons). Certainly there are a lot on this list that I have no interest in reading.

BTW, any idea who came up with the list? BBC, or are they quoting somebody else?

I'm trying to think of what kind of list would include Grapes of Wrath, A Christmas Carol, Remains of the Day, Harry Potter, and DaVinci Code, and yet leave out Neuromancer, or even Frankenstein. I want to say these books have all been made into movies, but there are a number of titles I'd have to cross-check with IMDb to see if there are corresponding films (and I doubt the Complete works of Shakespeare have been filmed...). Besides, that doesn't explain missing Frankenstein.

[tartysuz.livejournal.com]

I don't know the source of this list, but it looks suspiciously like the results of a recent survey sponsored by one or more of the British libraries that asked the general public for their favourite books. That's why you have a lot of bestsellers and very recent books. So it doesn't surprise me that Neuromancer and Frankenstein aren't on it: old and no buzz. If there had been a recent, cool Frankenstein movie, it would probably have been named.

[cat-named-eastr.livejournal.com]

This sounds like an office tally of what they considered great reading. =P