I found this on Unmitigated this morning and I love books so I had to do it. I've read 32 of the 100 books and have seen quite a few of the others as movies. One thing I find interesting in these lists is what gets left out. I found that this list seemed to favour books that have been adapted to film. And Jane Austen. Whatever, lists are always biased to whoever makes them up, regardless of whether it was done by a single person or a group.
"The Big Read is a USA National Endowment for the Arts program designed to encourage community reading initiatives and of their top 100 books, they estimate the average adult has read only six.
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Underline (or color) the books you LOVE .
Share this list in your blog, too, if you like."
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 (and from the 10th grade I wanted to name a daughter Scout until that bitch Demi Moore screwed it up for me)
6 The Bible (Um, I read the first half. Do I get a half point? I have read the Koran and recommend it to anyone, just to glimpse the other side of the fence, so to speak. And it's really short)
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 (many versions of the movie, thanks wifey!)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete? No, but a lot)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (movie a million times, thanks mom! Oh, and mom can totally recite the first paragraph. Possibly more. She's got skills)
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 (don't think I've actually read an Austen book but dear GOD the movies! I joke, but I have a man crush on Colin Firth so it's all good)
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 (his earlier books were much better, where are they? The War of Don Emmanuel's Nether Parts, I mean, just the name!)
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 Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (no, but the Gables are actually in my country)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (no, but a lot of other 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 (I defy you to find a better closing line, the best)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (still on my shelf unfinished)
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 (seriously? That's it? This man is a genuis)
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 (good, but where's A Short History of Nearly Everything?)
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 (started it...)
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 (There are some amazing Japanese writers out there, how about some whose books weren't turned into movies?)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (was read TO me, does that count?)
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 (no, but I did read Wind, Sand & Stars)
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
Oops, forgot to underline favs. My children are tired of being ignored though so there's no going back. Maybe I'll make my OWN list. Oooooo!
PS. If you do this and copy my list for your own blog, don't be a loser like me and forget to take out some of the comments like I did with Middle Aged Woman's list. Hopefully I got them all before you've read this.
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I've read 52 on the list - Will have to get started on the remaining
ReplyDeleteI might steal it and re-post in my blog.
What? You've never read Bridget Jones Diary? You just don't know what you're missing.
ReplyDeleteI LOVE this post some much I want to butter it, add some jam and eat it for brinner. Gonna steal. I'll link back.
"So much," not "some much." Dammit, haven't had enough coffee yet.
ReplyDeletejamie-52, wow, let me know when you're done
ReplyDeletebc-I saw the movie, and I didn't even notice. Time to brew another pot.
I love this. I can't help but stare at some of your unread books and want to yell at you to read them. Quickly. Especially Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
ReplyDeleteThe USA Nat'l Endowment for the Arts site has got a great list of books that have been used for The Big Read.
Great stuff.
(Oh, I did my own list, but some titles I just don't know I know I've never read "Moby Dick" (says she with the Masters in English - ha!), and I know I have read "Great Expectations" -- in the last couple of years -- but have I read "Oliver Twist"? Or just seen the movie musical "Oliver"? Who knows, really?
Who ARE you? No Charlotte's Web? Where's Twilight? I can't recommend The Kite Runner enough or the Time Traveler's Wife. The Shadow of the Wind is a favourite! My husband thinks it what's happens after he farts.
ReplyDeleteThis was a great idea. I thought of copying, but it just seemed too incestuous. It has brought to my attention I need to re-read some of the classics. Was Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret on that list?
Jen - Twilight should be on that list, right?! I kid, I kid. But "Are you there God, It's Me Margaret" for sure. It belongs on a list somewhere. Agree on Time Travelers Wife. So very very good.
ReplyDeleteWas it Samuel Johnson who took a year off and read everything there was to read? Of course, when he did it you could read everything there was to read in a year, but damn, to be able to do that...
ReplyDeleteAnyone ever read the Western Canon by Harold Bloom? It's kinda the be all end all of WHAT YOU SHOULD READ. If you're tenured, unmarried, no children. Funny enough, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret is not on the list so you know it's complete crap.
And ellie, you have a masters in English? What the hell are you doing here? I can't even use an apostrophe correctly (although, honestly, there was a time...).
It seems that half this list are required reading books in our nations schools, and most of thsoe ones have been made into movies.
ReplyDeleteI've read ten. But then I mostly read sociology, pschyology and science fiction.
And why does a book about a bunch of asian prostitutes made this list?
i'm staring at the list and am sad to say that i haven't read probably half or more of these books. not that i don't want to, but lazy i guess. who knows? omgosh..bridget jones's diary is one of my faves..modern day retelling of jane austen's pride and prejudice (which i love, too, btw).
ReplyDeletei told myself that i would read more 'worthy' material this year instead of trashy romance novels. hasn't happened yet...but hey, at least i'm not reading the trashy romance novels either. lol
surfer jay-what's wrong with Asian pros- never mind
ReplyDeleteciara-whatevs, as long as you're reading something.
I feel so lame that I've only read26. Had I actually read in school (like I was supposed to), I'm sure that number would have been higher!
ReplyDeleteHow many of the Salman Rushdie has Liam peed on?
ReplyDeleteLiam has only peed on The Enchantress of Florence, which is a very very lucky thing for him.
ReplyDeleteThat's one helluva list. I've read a lot of them, heard of most of em, but wow, some I don't know at all. Yikes.
ReplyDeleteArrrggghhhhhhh.....I totally did this list and I thought I had saved it somewhere but I can't find it.
ReplyDeleteThe INTERNETS suck today.
Oh, and this is the list that shamed me into reading what I'm currently reading...Anna Karenina.
ReplyDeleteShadow of the Wind is one of my favorite books. I gave a bunch of copies as gifts one xmas, and several people came to me later and thanked me for giving them that book - they loved it.
ReplyDeleteI think I will do this meme this afternoon.
Excellent! Another list to read. I love lists. Ånd welcome back.
ReplyDelete