Another Fine Book Meme

[lillibet]

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) Reprint this list in your own LJ 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
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 I think I've read them all at this point, though I do lose track.
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 (um, see #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
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'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 Burnet
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 (Isn't this covered by The Complete Works of William Shakespeare?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


Thanks to smacaski for the meme and the parenthetical comments. Like her, I'm mildly sorry not to have "strikethrough the ones you HATED" as a step, but it's probably best to avoid the controversy.

Comments

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

Ugh, what a stupid list (no offense). Friends are always asking me to do these memes, and even though I'm a voracious reader and an English literature teacher to boot, I always decline. I just cannot take seriously any grouping of books that contains pseudo-historical hack pulp schlockster Dan Brown, crypto-racist and proponent of le vice Anglais Enid Blyton, chick lit phoner-in Helen Fielding, derivative thief of far better children's fantasy J.K. Rowling, and gooey tripemonger Mitch Albom. What would it say about me if I had read all of those? That I had no taste? That I was wasting my time when I could be experiencing the manifold joys of vastly better books?

I know, de gustibus non est disputandum and all that, but honestly. Leaving aside the weird duplications of (yay) Shakespeare and (ick) C.S. Lewis, what does utility or significance does a list that nestles the Brontes alongside "nigger"[sic]-hater Margaret Mitchell and the author of Swallows and Amazons even possess?

There are books on that list that I love, books I despise, books I consider over- or underrated, but as a whole it seems vastly without meaning. Harry Freakin' Potter: yeesh.

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

Erm, that came out sounding much harsher than I wanted (Rowling and Dan Brown do that to me). But those sorts of lists always remind me of the old Seinfeld routine about people who share your birthday: "It's always an odd group of people too, isn't it? It's like Ed Asner, Elijah Muhammad and Secretariat." Of course, the soi-disant Greatest Snooty Classics Ever lists leave me cold, too; I would sooner peel each and every one of my fingernails backward until it ripped clean off than read Silas Marner or The Sun Also Rises again.

Ernest Freakin' Hemingway: yeesh.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I do have to wonder why you would ever click on a link to a list of books, if these are your feelings on the subject.

[scholargipsy.livejournal.com]

Because...because *choked-back sob* because...I love you.

Seriously, I dunno. Why do I look at any of the things on the Internet that wind me up? No good reason, alas.

[smacaski.livejournal.com]

I thought Silas Marner was okay, probably because it's relatively short. But Adam Bede? I'd rather gouge out my eyes with a dull spoon than read that crap again. It makes me wonder if I really want to try reading Middlemarch after all.

Still, at least Atlas Shrugged isn't on this list. Now there's a steaming pile of horse crap, literally and economically speaking.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

I'm so amused you said that! When I first saw the list and had my doubts about the way it was structured, one of my thoughts was -- in so many words -- "Well, at least Atlas Shrugged isn't on the list."

FWIW the comments about this meme on my own blog are certainly not meant as a slam against all the folks who did it -- as I said, I did enjoy reading it, especially when people made editorial comments about the double-inclusions and so forth. Nor would I appreciate anybody to trying to hold me to any kind of worthiness-standard for the memes I do choose to do. :)

[orbitalmechanic.livejournal.com]

Well, there's meaning in popularity. Gone With the Wind (which I haven't read) had a big impact on mainstream American literature, despite being a profoundly racist book even at the time. Uncle Tom's Cabin is a pretty crappy piece of literature, too.

[muffyjo]

The answer to how the list of books is chosen might be here in section 3 assuming this list came from The Big Read. I'll reprint it up here:

For the pilot phase of The Big Read, we studied the programs and reading lists of successful “city reads” programs around the country. Focusing on American literary classics, we selected books that would appeal to diverse audiences.

We now have a Readers Circle—a distinguished group of 22 writers, scholars, librarians, critics, artists, and publishing professionals—who suggest the next books for American communities to share.

So the answer is really, by popularity among a small group of people and focus groups.

As for calling anyone names (like Margaret Mitchell) you might consider her in her times. One might point out that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle hated women but one rarely remarks on it with such passion because he's part of his time, as was Margaret Mitchell. As the musical South Pacific explained "You've got to be carefully taught" as were many of each of their generations. The tolerance levels have changed, the books are already in print. It makes them dated, but it also shows a nice contrast to where we've been. At least, one hopes such things are true.

[whitebird.livejournal.com]

I've read either seven or eight on that list. I think I've read Secret Garden, but am unsure.

And then I look around the living room at the 1,000+ books I've read, and go, "Eh."

[muffyjo]

69 out of 100 for me. Interesting Meme. Nice combination of classics and currently popular books. I'm with you on the "isn't Hamlet part of the entire Shakespeare collection" question but my guess is that it's certainly one of his most famous so might sort of stand alone.

[bookly.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry to say that there are books on this list, like Great Expectations and On the Road, that I can't remember whether I've read. But at least I've read 15+ of the first 25, so you don't have to come force more on me. :)