(no subject)

[pebblerocker]

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

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 asterisk 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
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
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-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

It appears that I am hard to please and don't LOVE many books at all, unless they're children's books. I tried hard not to hate too many books, especially ones I haven't read, otherwise I would have asterisked all the Charles Dickens ones on the list. Reportedly he is depressing and full of poverty and unimaginable squalor, which fits very badly with sudden bursting into song and dancing down a picturesque London street, but that's how I prefer it: Oliver! the musical, not Oliver Twist the book. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown and A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving get asterisks because of other books I've read, or tried to read, by the same author, unfair as that may be. Lord of the Flies gets an asterisk for sounding really disturbing. Lolita gets one for major, major squick (I've seen a paragraph). To Kill a Mockingbird gets a gold star for incomprehensibility and boringness and because I was forced to read it for school. Bridget Jones's Diary gets an asterisk for having a really bad movie made out of it, which may also be unfair.

I intend to read the complete works of Shakespeare, not just the funnies, one day, and that would include Hamlet. I don't intend to read the Bible all the way through, I just sometimes think I do, and I feel a bit guilty about that.

Comments

[dr-sponge.livejournal.com]

I've certainly read more than six of that list. I'm keen on reading Dickens but, like many of his contemporaries, his sentences are always too long. (Bloody evolution of English). I've read Lolita, and it is a worthy book, but not very pleasant. (Bloody artist merit). You have to read "Cold Comfort Farm" and "Watership Down". And "Animal Farm", that's a shocker that one.

Grapes of Wrath is sitting on my bookshelf waiting to be read, and I want to read it, but I fear Steinbeck books because he is so good at articulating depressing aspects of life.

[pebblerocker]

Oh, I like long sentences, it's just the depressingness I can't handle. And in a way, Dickens wrote his books so people would know about the dreadful conditions that the poor had to endure, which is very worthy and all, but it's not relevant to the current situation, so it doesn't seem worth getting all morose about... there's plenty of dreadful conditions going on today as well which would be worth educating myself on. I'm not normally one to dismiss history as irrelevant, but times have changed.

I'm sure I would get some good mileage out of Animal Farm, yes. Watership Down is something I should have read years ago despite its reputation as a tearjerker.

Considering how down I felt when I was reading Steinbeck it's odd that I have no memory of his books being at all depressing.