That book meme~

[wordinista]

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list. (Six?  SIX?  THAT IS SHAMEFUL.)

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 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 all 7
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 (not the COMPLETE works, but good lord, enough of them)
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 (I'm... in the process of reading this one. That totally counts.)
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 (another "in progress" book)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -- okay, doesn't 'chronicles' contain tLtWatW??
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' 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
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 (wouldn't this be included in the complete works?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

  

Comments

[inusdemoness.livejournal.com]

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis -- okay, doesn't 'chronicles' contain tLtWatW??

Yep!

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Methinks someone got lazy when compiling the list...

[thatnanda.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this, it was quite fun. ^_^

[thatnanda.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and 53.

[naybob.livejournal.com]

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list.

:O

It's so depressing how little people read today. Especially kids. It's all about teh txt mssgs LOLZ, lk srsly, wut r books?
It frightens me.

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

It frightens me too.

I also realize how... old I sound when I say stuff like that. "Damn kids today with their illiteracy and their text messages!!"

[sharibet.livejournal.com]

Does it count if I haven't read the book but I've seen the movie?

(Just kidding!)

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

...

*whaps you*

[ankoku-jin.livejournal.com]

I read LIEK WHOA and even I haven't read all that many books on this list! I think it shows a distinct bias toward Eurocentric literature and fantasy, with only a few token offerings from Asia and the sci-fi genre. Where's Vonnegut? Pynchon? Asimov? Where's Mishima? Lao Tzu?

While it's true that the average American reads very little, I don't think it's fair to judge anyone simply because they haven't read the books on an arbitrary list. Who decides the value of literature?

(/end mini-rant) Not pointed at you, Bunneh, I totally respect you for your love of literature! *squish*

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

No, I did notice that it was pretty Euro-centric -- but then, my leanings are towards Euro-lit, so I can totally admit my bias here. That said, I'm reminded of a class discussion I had, waaaay back in the day when I was teaching, and learned that the entire class had no idea that "The Little Mermaid" was a book before it was a movie. (Also that one time a student argued with me that a "Galleon" was a coin when trying to identify metaphor and simile in the poem "The Highwayman." Sometimes pop culture gives me a headache.)

I would say that the list is probably composed of books that are (a) most frequently included on high school/college reading lists or (b) books that sell well. Or some combination of both. So it's probably not so much an arbitrary list as it is a list of books that are... most frequently read, and thus it's more shocking when someone's only read six books on the list. I know, for me, most of these were required reading for high school and college. Quite a few of them I wouldn't read again if my life depended on it. And quite a few books that I love aren't included on the list.

So I think it's a good list to get a sort of... base gauge for book-readin'. And the people who read a lot of stuff NOT included on the list... well, I kinda think the exercise doesn't apply, because (a) they know they read a lot and (b) have more eclectic taste.

[ankoku-jin.livejournal.com]

I think what really irritated me about this meme was seeing a lot of people bandy it about as some kind of proof of their superiority. *eyeroll* More socially-conscious people might bemoan the state of a populace who has read only a handful of these books, but that again leads to the question of the value of this particular list as a barometer of... what, really? Education? Literacy? Taste?

I realize there's no truly relevant gauge for this sort of thing, I just got tired of people acting like it was badge of honor to have read a bunch of books on a list of unknown compilation, when they may not read for pleasure or enjoyment at all now that they're out of school. And thus did the dragon come forth, and rant! XD

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Ah loev teh ranty Dragon. ♥

No, I get what you're saying. I don't think it's a badge of superiority, though I do think there's something problematic if someone reads through the list and has never even heard of half of these. I still read for pleasure now that I'm out of school, and quite a few of the books that I like haven't been included on the list. I still don't read very heavily OUT of the Eurocentric genre, but that's a question of personal preference over anything else.

It does raise an interesting question about the criteria used to create this list, particularly when there are at least two (pretty big, imo) errors on it -- the differentiation of "Hamlet" from "Complete Works of Shakespeare" and the differentiation of "The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe" from "Chronicles of Narnia." I don't think it's an be-all, end-all List o' Literacy, by any stretch of the imagination.

...That said, I also think that quite a few of the books on the list are overrated. XD

[everstar3.livejournal.com]

Hee, I had the exact same thought about both "Hamlet" being separate from the complete works of Master Shakespeare and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" being separate from the rest of the Chronicles. "Wait, but aren't those included in the -- the fact this even bothers me means I've already put more thought into it than most people have."

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

It's kinda stupid. I mean, it implies that they ran out of books to include, y'know?