books meme

[fpb]

"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.NB: since I do not know how to strikethrough a piece of text, I will just write NO WAY alongside.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 NO WAY
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
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
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres NO WAY
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 NO WAY
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 NO WAY
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (My feelings about this one are complicated. It is a masterpiece, but so horrifying I will not read it again)
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 maybe
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 tried once or twice
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 Tried once
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

Comments

[expectare.livejournal.com]

I've read 35. o.O

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres NO WAY

Weirdly, I was just wondering yesterday if you'd ever read Corelli's Mandolin. Why no way?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Because I have it on good authority (my sister) that it's full of pseudo-Italian ethnic cliches. And the very fact that the title mentions the cliche of cliches, the mandolin, does not encourage me.

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

I like this meme :-) A few thoughts: it actually made me smile to see 'The Little Prince' bolded and underlined on your list. Would you recommend The Three Musketeers? (I assume so, as you've underlined it, but I thought I would check!) Also, I finished Captain Corelli's Mandolin yesterday, and I think I have an inkling as to why you don't intend to read it.

Oh, and if you ever need to know for the future, how to strikethrough text:

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<strike*>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

I like this meme :-) A few thoughts: it actually made me smile to see 'The Little Prince' bolded and underlined on your list. Would you recommend The Three Musketeers? (I assume so, as you've underlined it, but I thought I would check!) Also, I finished Captain Corelli's Mandolin yesterday, and I think I have an inkling as to why you don't intend to read it.

Oh, and if you ever need to know for the future, how to strikethrough text:
<strike*> text here </strike*>
Take out the stars and it will strike out whatever text is between the two :-)

[tashmania.livejournal.com]

Oh, why has it done that?? It's supposed to be incorrect. Silly LJ.

[kennahijja.livejournal.com]

The Lord of the Flies... exactly same reaction. It's brilliant, but it leaves scars (only Atwood's Handmaid's Tale hit me even harder)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

stigandnasty919, below, has the exact same reaction; as he said in his meme, "how can you love and be repulsed by a book at the same time?" I guess that is a common reaction to Golding. It may have something to do with what Brian Alldiss, in a conversation with Kingsley Amis and CS Lewis, identified as the characteristic of Golding's style: "...a hallucinatory vividness." Both Lewis and Amis agreed (Lewis: "...all those details you only notice in real life if you've got a high temperature...")

Incidentally, you might want to friend stigandnasty919: he is a very intelligent native of the country you research, and a nice bloke altogether.

[every-bite.livejournal.com]

I second that re: Lord..., and I too consider Handmaid one of my favourite books of all time, but it's an excruciating experience to read it. Odd, I know, to favour a book that hurts to read!

[jennilee.livejournal.com]

What does the maybe mean? You can't remember if you've read Brave New World?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

No, that I just might read it, but that I do not feel the need to so keenly as, for instance, in the matter of Tolstoy or Donna Tartt or Thackeray.

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

It is the 'No Way's" that are interesting to me. You've explained Capt Corelli, and I can quite understand the inclusion of DaVinci Code - I feel as if Dan Brown owes me payment for the time I wasted reading his drivel, but I'd be interested in knowing why Margaret Atwood is on the list.

This meme reminded me of why I both like and detest my involvement in book groups. It was through a group that I first read Steinbeck and Waugh (although I hated Brideshead, I liked others). But I also read DaVinci Code and Lovely Bones, a book that repulsed me more than almost any other I have read apart from "Blood and Guts in High School" by Kathy Acker

[fpb.livejournal.com]

First, I dislike distopias on principle and taste both. Second, if I want to hear Christianity insulted, I will at least go to someone who knows something about it, and who, like Nietzsche, has something interesting to say.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Kathy Acker's life story is so pathetic that I am almost willing to excuse her hate-ridden writing. Almost.

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

Wait, you mean you've never actually read "His Dark Materials"?!

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I read the two first chapters of The Amber Spyglass. It was far more than enough. And, mind you, I hated it before I even began to realize that it had anything to say about Christianity. I simply could not bear the style. Of course, when I found out what it was meant to say, I was pleased.

[curia-regis.livejournal.com]

I found His Dark Materials rather boring. The first book was okay as a story. But it just wasn't... interesting!

Then again, fantasy has never been my cup of tea. HP is one of the few fantasy books I actually like.

I'm not surprised you like Little Women though. :) It might surprise you but it was one of my favourite books when I was a child and I've read the sequels.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You were Jo, of course.

[every-bite.livejournal.com]

I wonder what they really mean when they say "the average person". Who are The Big Read? Are we talking about the average American, or the average human...? Because it's scary to think that the magic number is truly 6. I know I ought not judge people by what or how much they read, but...seriously. Only SIX? I've read 28 of them, at first glance...and I take issue with a lot of their selections, too. I wonder how they arrived at those particular books (I had to nod and laugh at your "NO WAY" next to Dan Brown).

[dustthouart.livejournal.com]

There are two programs going by the name "the Big Read". The one that has a yearly survey of "the best-loved book in Britain" (this list is it, don't know from which year)... well I'll let you guess which country it's based in. ;)

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Man, talk about the collective wisdom of the internets. Someone has gone and tracked down the source of the meme and the list, and it turns out to be from some sort of "World Book Day poll," not either of the Big Reads. Since the press release is gone, it's impossible to say whether the number six bears any sort of relationship to reality; the author thinks it might be a misinterpretation of the fact that Americans read six books a year on average.

[elegant-bonfire.livejournal.com]

Oh, I forgot to ask, what did you think of Lolita? I read it for the first time a few months ago, as I'd always seen it praised as a classic, but I just found it depressing. Maybe because I'm reading it with a modern sensibility, but to me there was nothing romantic about it, Lolita herself came off as an abused young girl.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I read it long ago and found it clever but not very inspiring. Hubert Humbert is a shnook and a shlemiehl, though a very clever one, and the whole book is basically full of unpleasant people - stupid and manipulative psychologists, Lolita's brain-dead mother, the girl herself, tarty and inconsistent. Demonstration that you can make fine literature with very unpleasant ingredients - the book is indeed a masterpiece of sorts - but that you cannot make people like it.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

There really isn't meant to be much romantic or sympathetic about Humbert; in his autobiography Speak, Memory, Nabokov calls him "a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear 'touching.'" And according to Brian Boyd's biography of Nabokov—highly recommended, by the way—he was shocked when a Halloween trick-or-treater turned up on his doorstep dressed as Lolita; he certainly saw nothing admirable in pedophilia.

[goreism.livejournal.com]

Oops, I tracked down the quotation to the original source, and it's this. In response to an interviewer's suggestion that Humbert retains a "touching and insistent quality—that of the spoiled artist," Nabokov replies: "I would put it differently: Humbert is a vain and cruel wretch who manages to appear ‘touching.’ That epithet, in its true, tear-iridized sense, can only apply to my poor little girl"

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

[lametiger.livejournal.com]

I made a (repeated) point of stating that this was an imperfect analogy. But in my opinion the fact that Jesus promised the Spirit's guidance makes the source documents of Christianity MORE important than the source documents of a political system, not less so.

As you have indicated, it certainly seems that neither of us is likely to convince the other, so at this point I will echo Martin Luther: "On this I stand." The Bible is my authority for faith and practice, not any organization, no matter how ancient. I take the writings of Peter over any group that claims to be the earthly successors of Peter.

Re: No desire to be offensive, but . . .

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Your implication being that they contradict each other.