Book meme

[veronica_rich]

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

(The Big Read sounds kind of like a bunch of elitist wankers - which is hard to do when you have Harry Potter on your literature list.)

Anyway ...

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read. I could die in my sleep tonight. If I don't and I wanna read 'em, I'll read 'em. *G*
3) Underline the books you LOVE, add an strikeout the books you read but didn't like.


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 - Anonymous (eh, bits and pieces - I added the author bit *G*)
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 (enough to know I don't care much for the Bard)
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 (fabulous psychological study of narcissistic, damaged characters)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (does the movie count? *G*)
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (hey, REAL literature!)
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 (huh? this is a big cheat. it's up above!)
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 (WHAT?)
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 (actual scary REAL feminist stuff)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan (one single, crushing, devastating paragraph at the end that justifies the entire novel)
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 (I read about all this coming before it started coming to fruition in the real world. Oh my God)
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 (why? should I?)
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 (I hate you Dr. Mielke. May a thousand flies crawl up your ass and DIE for making me read this)
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 - Oh nostalgia
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (hell YES. I need to reread the entire works. and every pastiche I ever collected, besides)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Yes, in the original French)
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 hope this isn't considered THE list of seminal literature. Where's Frankenstein by Mary Shelley? A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft? ANYTHING by Stephen King? Where the eff is Chaucer? (And I'm sorry, if you're going to put Dan Brown on there, you damn well better have Carl Hiaasen.)

My God, where is James Michener, the KING of geographical history?!?

Comments

[philosophercat.livejournal.com]

no, no, no. It's just a best-selling, what Brits are reading thing from the BBC. ;)

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

Yeah, well, the Brits are lying. Ulysses by Joyce sucks balls. There can't be THAT many people who volunteer to read it. *snort*

[philosophercat.livejournal.com]

incl. books bought for uni courses ;)

[gryphons-lair.livejournal.com]

Apparently the list is from a BBC poll on its audience's best-loved books, which explains the heavy tilt toward European authors and classic kidlit.

[yoiebear.livejournal.com]

Interesting. God, I hate Dickens.

[caniad.livejournal.com]

Glad to know I'm not the only one.

This list seems a little...thin...in terms of quality literature. It's got a few good ones, but I'm not feeling like I've missed out on much. (That being said, I'm tempted to post it on my own journal to see what I have read.)

[yoiebear.livejournal.com]

I did it for my own knowledge and then deleted it. I was just curious.

[tyleet27.livejournal.com]

Add Vonnegut and Hemingway and Toni Morrison to that complaint. Kind of ridiculous.

[roguedemon.livejournal.com]

There are a few books on that list that have scarred me for life.
Honestly, there are a lot of great books out there. I find that I like contemporary stuff more than a lot of classics. There are so many "great books" that I have read, only to find them to be more exercises in writing technique than a good story with interesting characters.

[danglingdingle.livejournal.com]

How about "A List of Books and Authors That First Happened to Pop Into People's Minds When Asked?"

Far too many classics and way too few of the books people actually read for fun.

I mean the Bible? C'mon... And seriously, no Stephen King or even Poe? H.P. Lovecraft?

[gobsmacked.livejournal.com]

What about the Iliad and the Odyssey? What about Catullus and Vergil? Beowulf? The Tale of Genji? Remembrance of things past? Gilgamesh, for heaven's sake. (If you can include the Bible, Madam Bovary, War and Peace et al, these books are certainly eligible.) And this is why I didn't major in literature.

[gloromeien.livejournal.com]

I've seen this meme for a couple of months now and I share your righteous indignation. Indeed, I made a similar complain when one of the LOTR f-listers posted her own version and I was accused of taking the matter of debates related to cannon too seriously (which I find somewhat laughable in a fandom context).

Anyway, yes. This is a ridiculous list. I thought some of the choices extremely random (though I understand this was based on a poll, so...), especially the contemporary works. Any book store employee (I am an ex) will tell you that having Da Vinci and Five People there is simply a matter of sales, not quality. And why Ulysses and not Portrait? Why the double Shakespeare? The only positive things I can say is that there is a surprisingly decent Canadian representation and that if you have not read Shadow of the Wind, get thee to a bookstore now!

Cheers,
-G. ;D

[a-silver-rose.livejournal.com]

No Hawthorne, either. Or Arthur Miller, Hemingway, Faulkner, Twain . . . I kind of wonder what the list would look like if the poll was conducted in the U.S.

[veronica-rich.livejournal.com]

That's a very good question. For one, would it be more contemporary than classical? (I'd be willing to bet.) And I wonder what genres would be represented ...