Lit Meme

[peroxidepirate]

 q_sama  started it, but now everyone is doing it!

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
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling <-- I read the first two and the series just didn't grab me.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible <-- most of it, anyway.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens <-- possibly I hate it only because of the English class, not on it's own merit.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare <-- partial credit for having read three plays?
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 <-- is actually included in #33 ::eyeroll::
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
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
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 <-- LOVE LOVE LOVE!
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


I've read 27. I've tagged 23 others as books I'd particularly like to read, several of which are actually more than one book (like Lord of the Rings or The Complete Works of Shakespeare), and many of which are actually sitting on my bookshelf right now. If I read them all (...sure...) it'll take me, rather neatly, up to half.

Methinks I should be watching a bit less Doctor Who and reading a bit more classic literature.

And? If I'm somewhat embarrassed by how few of these I've read, it absolutely blows my mind that the average adult has only read SIX of these! I think there are at least six books on this list that every child should have read by the age of ten, and another six or so that are best read (the first time, I mean) between the ages of ten and fourteen. Adults have no excuse.

Comments

[q-sama.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong that I'm so glad you hated The DaVinci Code? :P

I really need to read The Color Purple. I've seen the movie and listened to the musical, but I'm thinking lots is still lost from the text. I'll have to look this one up soon. :)

(I'm glad to see others doing this meme, though Rosie tells me it's actually not the "real" version - she's looking that one up now.)

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

Is it wrong that I'm so glad you hated The DaVinci Code?

LOL, I had the same thought! Actually, I think there are a lot of us. We should start a club.

I was going to say I would lend you The Color Purple, but I picked it up just now and the pages are all coming out. Clearly I need to replace my copy. (I haven't read it that many times; I got it used & highlighted it all up for a class once.)

[erimthar.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I've read 24, but am deeply ashamed at some of the ones on this list that I haven't read yet.

I might do this meme later this evening.

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

YET is the key word, I think: if you care about books enough to have a list of books you'd like to read, you're in good shape. :)

[oseri]

Don't watch less DW! I'm dying to see what you make of Donna.

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

:D

If I get anyone wanting to know why I'm not reviewing Pierce fic, can I tell them you told me to keep watching Doctor Who?

Because I feel this responsibility toward Glake and TKO, and yet... I'm at the stage of obsession with DW where I kind of have to finish the series, soon.

Clearly things like work and sleep are taking up too much of my valuable internet time. *nods*

ETA: I love Glake, and all of the wonderful, crazy people I've met there! I'd be beyond brokenhearted if you all suddenly disappeared. I'm just, in a fandom-ish sense, distracted.

[oseri]

You can indeed! It's a perfectly valid reason. Whereabouts are you in DW? What do you think of Martha?

Aha, it's okay - we Tammy fans know how to stick around!

[peroxidepirate.livejournal.com]

Awesome! I'm only about 1/3 through S3, so I have a ways to go, yet.

I like Martha so far, and I love her intelligence. I think that's her defining characteristic. That's a wonderful surprise to find in a woman (especially a woman of color) on a major TV show. It's also a stroke of brilliance from RTD. I'm sure a lot of people were furious with Martha for not being Rose, so to win over the audience, she had to have something Rose lacked. Not that I think Rose is at all stupid; it just took her a while to get her feet under her, to get used to thinking critically in the way one has to when traveling through time and space. Martha just vaulted past that learning curve; she was there from the start. I like that.