The Big Read

[louiselux]

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

Apparently I hear that The Big Read reckons that on average most adults have only read six book on this list. Huh, I say.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - loved it with terrible passion as a teenager
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - bits of, anyway
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - I loved this at the time
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - this was always the book that wasn't 'What Katy Did' for me. I read the latter and became mildly obsessed at the whole Americaness of it, and yet couldn't bring myself to read Little Women.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - no, but more than a few
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 - began, found it impenetrable and gave up
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 - hated it due to endless worm politics
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - a work of genius
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 - utterly crushing
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 - I keep meaning to read this
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - enthralling but I can't say I love it, exactly
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 - I liked this a lot and was thrilled by the magical realism, which up till then I had not discovered
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - began, never finished
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - was everything I wanted to find when I was a child
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - parts of, it made my mind hurt
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 - read but did not hugely enjoy
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 - strangely uninvolving and annoyingly hard to comprehend
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - left me feeling unhappy, I was far too young to appreciate it
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - started it, got bored
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - over and over, it felt like, for my English lit O level
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[new-kate.livejournal.com]

>Dune - Frank Herbert - hated it due to endless worm politics

WORD

I should do this too! Oooh fun, booksessss...

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Oh, the worm politics - it just lost me so hard.

You should do it, I agree.

[kerumica.livejournal.com]

Does it count if you watched the movie? Cause if not, then man, I really suck :(

[baka-gaijin.livejournal.com]

OMG... I was thinking the same thing!

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Heee!

It probably half counts, or something.

[kerumica.livejournal.com]

Well if that's the case then I'm doing too bad :)

[trensaddiction.livejournal.com]

With a list like that, six seems like an awfully low average. I mean, I was required to read four of these in school. *laughs*

Ah well. It's interesting to see what made the list and what didn't.

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Yeah, six does seem incredibly low.

It is an interesting mix of best seller list, modern classics and older classics. I wonder how they picked them?

[emungere.livejournal.com]

I loved the worm politics! :D

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

*worms*

That's because you are a crazy wench!

No, srsly, I think it's because of my inability to keep a grasp of the complicated names and various factions and so on, it's always been a problem for me in fantasy novels for some reason - with Dune I was pretty much utterly lost after the first few chapters.

[gen50.livejournal.com]

hi. i did this thing too, i was hoping to get half the list but i dont know (you have a tad under half, if my eyeballing is decent)

I have a bad tendency to read everything an author writes once i get to like 1 book. Like Tolkien, or Doyle, or Austen for that matter.

some books i've read because they were school assignments but re-discovered (when i got a tad older) them and read more books of the same author.
Like Fyodor Dostoevsky (sp?).

and i love sci-fi and fantasy, and whodunnits!
Any genre you prefer?

[louiselux.livejournal.com]

Pretty much the same genres as you, actually. I love Conan Doyle too, and am partial to a good thriller/crime novel. I've read mostly Patricia Highsmith and Raymond Chandler.

Yep, your eyeballing is stunningly accurate! I've read 44 of them.

[mendax.livejournal.com]

I so agree with you on The Secret Garden.

And I think I recommend Lolita. It's one of those books where I can never quite remember why I liked it, and then I pick it up and start reading it again and am like, "Oh yeah, because it's effing brilliant!" It may be time to read it again though, because I'm forgetting why. I can't think of any other book that I have that issue with. It's odd.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

Read Life of Pi and Lolita. You will not regret it.