Friday 25 July 2008

Trying to be well read

I found this meme, well its more like a quiz, at Jane Austen's World. I won't be tagging anyone, but feel free to copy and paste into your own blog if you want to.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on the list.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (pink) 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"

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
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
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 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well, I think I'm doing alright on 29

Personally I would add these to the top of the list, and they are great books:
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
The 'Master and Commander' series - Patrick O'Brian
Coming Home - Rosamunde Pilcher
Love in a Cold Climate and sequels - Nancy Mitford
actually there are so many more which should be in the list, one day I might have some serious time to kill and I'll write my own top 100.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm tickled to see that the Enid Blyton Faraway tree books are on the list!
Wow, isn't it kind of depressing that they reckon the average adult has only read 6 of these (especially given the fact that Winnie the Pooh and Alice in Wonderland are on the list)? Congratulations on your 29!

shopgirl said...

What about the Brother Karamazov? Or any Haruki Murakami, Milan Kundera, David Sedaris? And what is the Da Vinci code doing there? Ah well, nice job at 29. And thank you for your sympathy for my lost sock:)

Anonymous said...

Fabulous. I'm glad you played along.

juicyknits said...

Yeah, Brother Karamazov should be on as well. I've just played right now and came up with 27. Some of the books on this list really surprised me. But it was a fun thing to do. And the books you've read do say a lot about you. ;-)

weaverknits said...

Holy crap, I've read 52 of these!!! This is actually a pretty good list... I like the fact that some really groundbreaking newer stuff is there (The Curious Incident of the Dog at Night Time is really sweet and touching and funny, by the way, and you can read it in an evening or two). I also agree with you about the Master and Commander series... I LOVE these!

amy said...

I am so happy to find someone else obsessed with patrick o'brian. I love Aubrey and Maturin.

Quail said...

Awesome list! I was surfing for a decent, real, uncommercial list and yours looks very, very good. Jump to No. 60 as soon as possible. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is just the most enchanting book of all time. GGM books are constantly installed on my bedside.