Book Meme that's going around.

[palsgraf_polka]

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) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own journal 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 (maybe not a few obscure things)
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' 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

Comments

[toohipanna.livejournal.com]

crap...you did a cut...now i have to do a cut....sigh...

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

Damn woman! You have read a lot of those kind of books. I love obscure history books and trashy detective novels, so a lot of what I read would never show up there. But I realize there are so many I want to read and never do. Alas.

[jvmatucha.livejournal.com]

Tah dah!

http://jvmatucha.livejournal.com/267533.html


You have got to read A Confederacy of Dunces! Readit readit readit!

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

ok ok! I'll check it out. But first on my reading list are Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead after watching a 13 hour marathon of Mad Men on Saturday, because apparently the main character is the ideal objectivist. So I'm intrigued.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

oh, have *fun* with that.

Ayn Rand is just so . . . . . . . . .

(thinking)

. . . (trying to think of something not insulting)

. . .

so . . .

ummmm . . .

I'm sure her novels are much better than her books of philosophy/politics!!!

I'm absolutely sure they are not worse!!!

=)

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

Hahahahaha...I've always heard they were trash. But over on televisionwithoutpity.com they were all atwitter about the main character being so much like the main character in The Fountainhead and on the show itself one of the minor characters tells the main character to read Atlas Shrugged, and I hate being ignorant, so I'll read the books.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

Well, she does have legion of fans, so maybe it won't be too unpleasant. The movie of The Fountainhead, while not on my rec list to anyone, was okay except for one scene.

Is this main character they are talking about really uncompromising and devoted to professional principles, or something?

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

Is this main character they are talking about really uncompromising and devoted to professional principles, or something?

Well, sort of. He's very driven, he's one of the best advertising men in NYC in 1960. He is dedicated to his work persona to the point that his family in the suburbs is neglected, but in the city he's always in his Ad Man character. You'd kind of have to see the show.

So I want to read the books and see what they are talking about.

[sandman008.livejournal.com]

Well, she does have legion of fans, so maybe it won't be too unpleasant.

You mean softheaded faux-libertarian naifs who glommed on because the books attempt to provide a moral justification for vaunting "I've Got Mine" assholery? Sure, a billion Chinese can't be wrong about rice, but just because a certain stripe of coddled, postmodernist pseudointellectual twits happen to ascribe some level of literary importance to her works should not be taken as any positive indication of their quality.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

lol!

Well, I was trying to be reassuring, or positive, or something. But I *totally* agree w/you about her books of "philosophy", i.e. bad, hate-filled, precursor to Hannity, really nasty and-leaving-a-lingering-bad-taste when you read it poli sci, and the general motivations of those who love her. =)

That said, some awful people write good fiction and visa versa, so while the odds are not good, I won't completely dismiss any possibility of her fiction books being good out of hand.

And *that* said, poor Aemilia if she really puts herself through this . . .

[bebo-65.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed Atlas Shrugged. It was my now-defunct-work-book-club selection, and once I got into it, I couldn't put it down. In fact, I was in the middle of it when we went on a family beach trip. I typically read total and utter trash at the beach, but I just couldn't bear to put it away.

I want to read The Fountainhead too.

[kittylitter1.livejournal.com]

I'm sure her novels are much better than her books of philosophy/politics!!!

They aren't. I tried. The only books I have been completely unable to finish were The Golden Bowl (only got 1/3 of the way through) and The Fountainhead.

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

heh, thanks for the tip. Not that I was gonna read them anyway, but is good to know I'm not missing much.

[philosophyjeff.livejournal.com]

I've only read eight of these.

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't feel so bad now for only having read about 20 or so. I know firsthand that you are a genius. :)

Hey - question for you. This just popped into my head for some reason. Were you the 3rd person at Mike's house that time we all had a bet to see who could masturbate the fastest and went into separate rooms and did it? I remember winning because I'm a girl. It was such a Seinfeldian thing to do, before there even was a Seinfeld.

[philosophyjeff.livejournal.com]

I don't recall that. Though that sounds like something that would have gone on at Mike's house.

[palsgraf-polka.livejournal.com]

It was one of you. Maybe it was Greg. Who knows. Fun times!

[mojave-wolf.livejournal.com]

well, I got my 6 in the first nine and 12 at 22, then suddenly my % plummetted before making a late comeback, and I wound up w/33. Too bad we can't count movies (on the other hand, Hamlet was sort of a twofer . . .)

[bebo-65.livejournal.com]

I'm at about 43 of those. I'm too fucking lazy to do the meme, though.

[kittylitter1.livejournal.com]

49. But you knew that. :-)

[iron-chef-gein.livejournal.com]

I saw three I hadn't read and at least 35 I earnestly wish I had never encountered.