Monday, August 11, 2008

100 books half-read

Via EineKleine Rob (who came via Phil)

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. (I see no reason to restrict ‘books I hated’ to school - there are only a couple of books on the list I really disliked, and neither of them was a school text.)
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - life is too short
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - what can I say: my dad was an evangelical christian..
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - is it possible to DOUBLE underline one that you really love?
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 - Blimey, I mean, I've read a LOT of Shakespeare but not all of it although I have loved pretty much all I have read...
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 - phew, just got under the wire on that!
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 - no desire to read that in a hurry again...
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - tried and failed. God, it's miserable.
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 - life is too short, sorry.
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 - could not get on with it
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

Hmm, I think there are 50 I think I can lay fair claim to - some I haven't read for a long LONG time. Others: meh. Not much I hate, though several I really haven't got time for in this lifetime. For shame.

7 comments:

JoeinVegas said...

Oh no, readers! If so then why aren't more of them marked off?

Persephone said...

There is always time in anyone's lifetime for humour, IMHO. I therefore plead with you to get cracking and read The Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and argue the case for Cold Comfort Farm and Anne of Green Gables, the latter not just because it's Canadian, but it's actually very funny.

Lisa Rullsenberg said...

I think I MAY have read Anne of Green Gables when much younger but since I can remember nothing of it, I felt that was a big cheat to include and as I couldn't recall much I didn't feel I was likely to make the effort to read it. on your rec I may have to revise my thoughts!

HHGTTG I am pretty sure I have read (least I think I did off the back of the radio/TV dramatisations) and we do have the set so I should get round to making sure I have read it.

It is quite bonkers how much stuff there is on the list that is unread: but rethinking what I marked up, I do recall vaguely reading Cold Comfort Farm which I didn't find half as entertaining and sharp as I was recommended. Still, there are at least 10 I'm never going to get around to and severla more I am at least ambivalent about (there are a few not marked at all which means I just don't know if I want to read them or not...)

Anonymous said...

About 25 for me - Can't see me ever reading the Da Vinci Code or Harry Potter though.

The biggest gap in my reading is women... hardly read any books by women: not even Brontes or Austen. Not a deliberate choice, just the way it worked out.

Tina said...

73 read in my case - comes of being old!

chrissie_allen said...

60 for me. Comes of being almost old ;-)

Imposs1904 said...

16 for me.

I think when it comes to such lists, if you didn't read much as a child then you're stuffed.

That's my excuse and I'm sticking to it. ;-)