Tuesday, July 8, 2008

sparkle Started It

sparkle started it.

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 started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog 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 (M and I read them out loud to each other—my Elvish is better but he chants better)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (only because I had to for school)
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (but not in sequence)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (only because I had to for school)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (We’re in the middle of the Golden Compass)
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 (read several, though not nearly all)
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 -
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 (probably only my favorite series of all time—I have every book ever published with LMM stories)
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 (truly excellent—my senior seminar was on Nabokov)
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64. The Lovely Bones- ALice Sebold
65. The 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
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Though I have a few to add of my own. Seriously. No mention of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Clarissa, Harriet the Spy, or The Sweet Potato Queens? Who are they kidding with this "Top 100" nonsense?

4 comments:

Indy said...

You are SOOO right about Harriet the Spy, Iris! I'll have to look up the Sweet Potato Queens...

Serenity Everton said...

Hmm... it's not my list of favorite books by any means, but who knows when they last featured those books? We should suggest them, I think!

I just read The Age of Innocence because it's on the featured book list now. And I'm pretty certain that Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston) will be on my Kindle soon enough. Tom Sawyer is upcoming as a featured book, but The Joy Luck Club, The Grapes of Wrath, My Antonia, and Bless Me, Ultima are all featured right now. It's an interesting collection, but they can't force people to choose one book over another.

sparkle

Dr. Ken said...

By my count, I've read 28 of these....
I'm a little surprised at the way they count--I meam, The Lord of the Rings--that's 3 books, but they apparently only count it as 1? The Harry Potter series is 7 books...and so on....
I'm also surprised to see Mitch Albom's "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" on the list but not "Tuesdays With Morrie"....

Dr. Ken

ZED and ginger said...

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night time is suggested reading! I wouldn't have picked it myself on title alone, but my good friend Richard Windsor had read it and liked it so much that he ordered me a copy for my birthday. It's told from the view of an autistic boy, and having a child with Autism, I found this very compelling. The author did a good job keeping that perspective, too!

g.