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Jun. 26th, 2008 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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bodldops.
"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) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
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 – I… maybe? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure I read one of hers but can't say for sure.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – hmm baby yes, starting when I was eight. AND the Hobbit. AND the Silmarillion. AND roughly 2/3 of the History of Middle-Earth background books. AND Roverrandom. AND Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wooton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – Two or three separate Catholic translations, basic Protestant translation, a rather nice Tanakh… I was a religion major in college. Would've rated an underline if I didn't feel that putting an underline in was just asking for trouble.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – Oh dear God such a point to start fanficcing from! Never mind Star Trek (although I did some of that too), my first serious attempt at fanfic was a story about a Thought Policeman who lost his ability to do his job and wound up going over to the wrong side of the fence… I want it noted that I read an arseload of Orwell's other books too, and I do not just mean the piggies, either. I mean Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier and the like.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – I honestly don't remember whether I read this in high school or not. I remember a Dickens novel where I had to use Monarch Notes to retain any memory of what happened in any given chapter. This may have been it.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Ish. Not all of them. Dude, how many plays, how many sonnets?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – Alas, no. Although my great-grandmother knew the DuMauriers. That's as close as I get.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Meh, it was okay. It was on the reading list in seventh grade and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Scarlett, why did you waste so much time chasing after a badly closeted homosexual? Whyyyyy?
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 - Adored this book. adored it.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – Ugh ugh ugh, after the travesty that was The Red Pony, I owe Steinbeck NOTHING. Every book of horse stories I had as a little kid included a chunk of The Red Pony. It was horrible and tragic and there were vultures and a dead horse and I wanted to see if there was better story for the poor horse so I read the book and found out that the pony gets maybe a quarter of the book's pages and NEVER GETS MENTIONED AGAIN EXCEPT ONCE, NEAR THE END. Steinbeck is a filthy depressing liar and if I wanted to know that 'life in rural America's hard and things important to us die' I'd go work in West Virginia mining country and at least make the world better by it.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I didn't like her. The book was okay, but Anna was a little too self-indulgent for my taste. Still, Kitty and Fyodor were cool.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis I was so proud of myself for spotting the religious symbolism when I read this. Bear in mind I was like seven.
34 Emma - Jane Austen – Erm. Maybe? It was this or Pride and Prejudice. I forget which.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Cheating! This was already covered in #33!
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 - OH HELL YES
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - I named a foetal pig Snowball before dissecting it in high school. Fun book.
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – What the hell is this doing on any kind of list that contains books with any form of merit whatsoever? No, I haven't read it, but I've seen some of the reported contents, and it makes me twitchy to think of.
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 – Sorta started once, never got more than a few pages in.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - One of many reasons I didn't bother trying to impress boys in high school.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - Oh hell yes. I loved this one, to the point where I let my love convince me to read all the sequels Frank wrote. Even though at the tender age of… I think I was 14 by the time I read the last one… I could already tell that Frank had managed to go just a li'l bit crazy. We do not speak of the Brian Herbert stuff. That doesn't exist.
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 – I tried, oh, God, I tried, but I couldn't get through more than two or three pages at a time without having to stop and go back…
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – Possibly the only major dystopian work that I did not devour in its entirety. I read a good chunk of it and had to give it back to the library, and never did finish.
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 - See my feelings on Steinbeck above. That said, the most important lesson out of this book? "A man's got to shoot his own dog."
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - The Haydee plot felt tacked on, but otherwise? Lovely stuff.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding – What. Just what. What the hell is this doing with real books? I have very little tolerance for books where I'm supposed to cheer on a whiny self-indulgent female lead. I looked at the back of this one, realized it wasn't gonna happen for me, and walked away.
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - When someone who's capable of ploughing through Lovecraft by the truckload and who loves whales and old-school anthropology can't get through your book because you put in too many random reference chapters, Mr. Melville, you have a problem. I will read this all the way through one day, but only so that I can write The Pequod Horror. Also, Patrick Stewart is totally my Captain Ahab.
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 – Tried. Got a facial tic. Put it back.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Grim and cautionary. Lovely stuff.
82 Cloud Atlas
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert – ARRRRGH HATE YOU HATE HATE HATE dear Emma Bovary: remember how I didn't like Anna Karenina? YOU ARE WORSE. You are a whiny, self-indulgent twat who lives so far into a fantasy world that you killed yourself when reality wouldn't bend to meet your pretty little dreams. Some people actually work to accomplish what they want. I would have had more sympathy for you and your Trapped In A Marriage To A Man I Don't Want, Oh Noes, if you had murdered the doctor and run away, because then at least you'd have taken some ACTION. You are a horrible, gormless woman with no spine worth mentioning and no redeeming features, and I hope that Scarlett O'Hara meets you one day and kicks you in the face. She might've had misdirected passions and bad priorities, but she at least had the capacity to realize she had to deal with her own goddamn destiny. You? Are a vapid bitch, and that's an insult to bitches.
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 - another happy-making book, or rather total collection – I read them all. The annotated Baring-Gould edition was FASCINATING and I must get my own copy. I attempted Holmes fic when I was in high school, too.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - On the recommendation of Muppet Magazine when I was in fifth or sixth grade, no less. No, I did not expect a children's story; the recc was "A serious novel in which all the main characters are rabbits", and in fifth grade I was reading Dune and The Mists of Avalon.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – The only Shute novel I ever remember being much interested in was On the Beach, and I don't think I got to read that all the way through.
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Again with the cheating, this was covered in the omnibus edition above.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Also Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator.
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
bodldops."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) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
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 – I… maybe? I don't remember. I'm pretty sure I read one of hers but can't say for sure.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – hmm baby yes, starting when I was eight. AND the Hobbit. AND the Silmarillion. AND roughly 2/3 of the History of Middle-Earth background books. AND Roverrandom. AND Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wooton Major and Farmer Giles of Ham.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible – Two or three separate Catholic translations, basic Protestant translation, a rather nice Tanakh… I was a religion major in college. Would've rated an underline if I didn't feel that putting an underline in was just asking for trouble.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – Oh dear God such a point to start fanficcing from! Never mind Star Trek (although I did some of that too), my first serious attempt at fanfic was a story about a Thought Policeman who lost his ability to do his job and wound up going over to the wrong side of the fence… I want it noted that I read an arseload of Orwell's other books too, and I do not just mean the piggies, either. I mean Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier and the like.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – I honestly don't remember whether I read this in high school or not. I remember a Dickens novel where I had to use Monarch Notes to retain any memory of what happened in any given chapter. This may have been it.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Ish. Not all of them. Dude, how many plays, how many sonnets?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – Alas, no. Although my great-grandmother knew the DuMauriers. That's as close as I get.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Meh, it was okay. It was on the reading list in seventh grade and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Scarlett, why did you waste so much time chasing after a badly closeted homosexual? Whyyyyy?
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 - Adored this book. adored it.
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – Ugh ugh ugh, after the travesty that was The Red Pony, I owe Steinbeck NOTHING. Every book of horse stories I had as a little kid included a chunk of The Red Pony. It was horrible and tragic and there were vultures and a dead horse and I wanted to see if there was better story for the poor horse so I read the book and found out that the pony gets maybe a quarter of the book's pages and NEVER GETS MENTIONED AGAIN EXCEPT ONCE, NEAR THE END. Steinbeck is a filthy depressing liar and if I wanted to know that 'life in rural America's hard and things important to us die' I'd go work in West Virginia mining country and at least make the world better by it.
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - I didn't like her. The book was okay, but Anna was a little too self-indulgent for my taste. Still, Kitty and Fyodor were cool.
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis I was so proud of myself for spotting the religious symbolism when I read this. Bear in mind I was like seven.
34 Emma - Jane Austen – Erm. Maybe? It was this or Pride and Prejudice. I forget which.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Cheating! This was already covered in #33!
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 - OH HELL YES
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - I named a foetal pig Snowball before dissecting it in high school. Fun book.
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – What the hell is this doing on any kind of list that contains books with any form of merit whatsoever? No, I haven't read it, but I've seen some of the reported contents, and it makes me twitchy to think of.
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 – Sorta started once, never got more than a few pages in.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - One of many reasons I didn't bother trying to impress boys in high school.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - Oh hell yes. I loved this one, to the point where I let my love convince me to read all the sequels Frank wrote. Even though at the tender age of… I think I was 14 by the time I read the last one… I could already tell that Frank had managed to go just a li'l bit crazy. We do not speak of the Brian Herbert stuff. That doesn't exist.
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – Possibly the only major dystopian work that I did not devour in its entirety. I read a good chunk of it and had to give it back to the library, and never did finish.
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 - See my feelings on Steinbeck above. That said, the most important lesson out of this book? "A man's got to shoot his own dog."
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - The Haydee plot felt tacked on, but otherwise? Lovely stuff.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding – What. Just what. What the hell is this doing with real books? I have very little tolerance for books where I'm supposed to cheer on a whiny self-indulgent female lead. I looked at the back of this one, realized it wasn't gonna happen for me, and walked away.
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
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 – Tried. Got a facial tic. Put it back.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Grim and cautionary. Lovely stuff.
82 Cloud Atlas
83 The Color Purple, Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
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 - another happy-making book, or rather total collection – I read them all. The annotated Baring-Gould edition was FASCINATING and I must get my own copy. I attempted Holmes fic when I was in high school, too.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine de St. Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - On the recommendation of Muppet Magazine when I was in fifth or sixth grade, no less. No, I did not expect a children's story; the recc was "A serious novel in which all the main characters are rabbits", and in fifth grade I was reading Dune and The Mists of Avalon.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute – The only Shute novel I ever remember being much interested in was On the Beach, and I don't think I got to read that all the way through.
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Again with the cheating, this was covered in the omnibus edition above.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Also Charlie And The Great Glass Elevator.
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
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no subject
Date: 2008-06-26 02:23 pm (UTC)I don't know anyone who's read all of Shakespeare's works; I think the histories are the killer. ;) My last count was 27 plays and all the sonnets, and until I go to grad school, it'll probably stay that way. No matter my intentions, I'll always get snared by Hamlet. :)
no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 11:32 am (UTC)Re: Moby Dick: I'm fairly reliably informed by a friend of mine with an English Lit masters that Moby Dick is a really good book and a treatise on whaling, all interspersed--if you skip the chapters on whaling, it was apparently a decent read.
And I'm passing this on for the edification of all mankind, and not just because I now really want to read "The Pequod Horror". Honestly. No, really. edification all the way. :)