Book thingy

[dicreasy2]

I'm currently procrastinating whilst trying to write my next chapter.  I have only 25 slides more to do, and the cover to make, but I'm finding it hard going.  I thought I'd do this to try to gain some inspiration.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

 

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen This was one of the novels I studied at A-level, so 10 years ago I knew it inside out and upside down.
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
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 Another novel I studied at A-level.  Not my favourite of Hardy's novels, but excellent material for lit crit.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I've read quite a few, but not the complete works. I've often thought about getting a copy though.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger Yeah, I tried to read this when I was 14, never got past the third page.
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   Love, love, love all the books in this series.  I can't count how many times I've read them.
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  Mum bought this for me when I was younger, but I never got past the first chapter.
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 One of my favourite books from my childhood, I can still read it again and again.
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
42The 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 First hardy novel I read, I actually studied it at GCSE.  It remains my favourite of his.
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  Starting reading it, but found it too depressing, even for Hardy so gave up.
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 I love all of his travel books, but being British, I laughed harder at this one, because so much of what he writes is true.
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  I don't normally read short stories, but I do like these.  Mainly because there are a couple where I worked out who the perpetrator was before Holmes.
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 I read most of Roald Dahl's books when I was a child, but this is probably my favourite.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo.

 

 

Hmm, considering how many of books I have read over my life, I thought I would have read more on this list than I have.    The BBC website has a section devoted to their Big Read.  Their version goes up to 200 and there are a lot more that I've read, including lots of Pratchetts. 

Yeah, still not feeling inspired, oh well, I will get it all finished for Monday, but I think I'm done for tonight.

Comments

[docnerd.livejournal.com]

Eh, don't feel too bad about not reading more of the list--there's loads of great stuff that isn't on the list to start with! I'd rather read stuff I know I'll enjoy than sit down with some Dickens just because I'm "supposed" to have read Oliver Twist because it's a classic.

Victorian update Monday? Yay!

[dicreasy.livejournal.com]

Oh I agree. I must admit, most of the classics bore me to tears, and there's a lot of them on this list. I personally would rather read the wit of Pratchett, than the wit of Austen.

Victorian update Monday, definitely.