I read a post on another blog about the Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts), which surmises that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books (though some of their "top 100" are debatable). I was initially surprised to hear that most people have read even six of the "top 100" books, then I noticed that they included the Harry Potter series and Bridget Jones' Diary.Anyway, this is what one is supposed to do with this list on one's own blog:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read or have started but haven't finished (I had to fight the urge to italicize every item on the list. These are titles of books, after all, and they should be punctuated as such.)
3) Mark in a different color the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your 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
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I must have collectively read the whole thing, what with over 12 years of Sunday School, four years at a private college, and teaching Sunday School now.)
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 (So close!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Thank you, Mr. Collins)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Yuck! Never again!)
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 (A bestseller, yes. But a top 100?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (Not my favorite John Irving book)
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 (Really? No...)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I refuse! Ahab himself could hunt me down, and he still couldn't force me to read this book.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I love all his stuff!)
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 (Though I liked Tuesdays With Morrie better)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Not by choice, and not recommended reading)
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Hopefully, the English translation counts)
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 (I tried to get rid of it, but it kept haunting me. I literally threw this book in the trash, and someone mailed it to me.)
I've read 42 of them. I feel like I should have read more, especially if I'm going to be teaching literature to young people.
So how many on the list have you read? It might be easier for some of you to just share which ones you haven't read. :) Are there any that you feel were left out (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, for example), or are there some that shouldn't be included on this list?
9 comments:
WHY is Madame Bovary on that list? I heartily disagree with it's listing.
I agree with your comments, Rache, about Dan Brown and Helen Fielding. They haven't stood the test of time.
The other one which was absolutely atrocious was Shadow of the Wind. It's so similar in style to Isabel Allende. All those Spanish authors obviously learned with the same teacher. Dense! Dense! Dense! If you like tedious books, they fall into that category.
Lovely Bones? Give me a break! That is the most teen book I've read in ages. It's poo. . . .
Quite a few of these books aren't legitimate entries. I mean, I love the Bible, but I don't think it fits in this list, and I don't agree with listing an anthology or series as a single book. Add to that the fact that a few of them are no more than recent bestsellers, and this list is terribly flawed.
We should make our own "top 100" list! How nerdy is it that I think that would be tons of fun?!
Hmmm... I have read 25 of them. Some as a kid though, and some as mandatory reading at school, several of the above I remember little of. I guess it is better than 6 though! I do disagree with "the lovely bones" being on there. But I could go on. It does remind me that I need to read more. But seriously, no Carl Hiaasen on there? Or Kurt Vonegat? As for One hundred years of solitude.... I think I was almost insane after reading that book!
I've read 27... and started many more without finishing them.
Also, as I said in my blog just moments ago, I think that the reason for the oddness of the list is it's based on a list the BBC compiled in an attempt to find out what Britons' favorite book was.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
And I would totally be on board with the Rachel's Friends' List of What to Read. And its counterpart, Rachel's Friends' List of What Not to Read (Believe Me, We Know; We've Tried).
I will not post the number I have read. It's quite a few. Also, I don't have enough space to write everything I'd like about all of them.
I would like to see more non-fiction. The modern non-f. writers have pulled some of the good characteristics of fiction writing. Devil in the White City is great.
(It is also driving me nuts that I can't punctuate the titles correctly!)
I got 32! I must agree Rachel - if I could take back my experience with Moby Dick you know I would...
And wait a minute - I loved Madame Bovary! And I loved 100 years of Solitude too, though it did almost take me 100 years to get through it.
And for the record - I used The Lovely Bones as teaching material for my English as a Second Language students because it was easy for them to understand, yet interesting enough to keep them reading. 'nuff said there.
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