The Big Read ("whatever that is" says Persephone - I believe it was a reading initiative launched without a hint of irony by reading's greatest friend, television, years ago, so this meme has been around the block a few times, which is the sign of a good meme, cf Dawkins 'The Selfish Gene') 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 intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or for whatever reason loathe.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only 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
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
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - see above
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
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 - Funnily enough, was having a conversation about this last night at dinner. Apparently the only way to survive to the end is to skim-read War, but it is worth the effort.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - I borrowed this off a friend years ago at university. I got as far as Crime and then she needed it back to revise for her finals. So am yet to experience Punishment. I have every intention of finishing it though, hence hybrid bold and italics. You can draw your own conclusions re Shakespeare.
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 - I was halfway through this and at a particularly dull bit about peasant farming methods when my mother decided to tell me what happened at the end. In fact what actually happened is that she said "Everyone knows what happens at the end of Anna Karenina" and I said "I am halfway through reading Anna Karenina and i don't know what happens at the end" and she said "Come on, everybody knows that bla bla bla" only she didn't say "bla bla bla" she said the actual end. And so I never finished it. This was a long time ago though and I realise now there is a lot more to Anna Karenina than the end, so I will go back to it.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Hate to point out to whoever wrote this list that The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe (36) is actually part of the Chronicles of Narnia (33). Either this list was compiled by idiots or, and I think more likely, somewhere along the meme path somebody altered it so that they could claim to have read more books. That's called adaptation, Dawkins would be proud.
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins The other problem with an author doing this is we are never going to openly admit that we probably won't get around to The Woman In White. Having said that, my mother is reading it at the moment (perhaps I will tell her the ending?) and she says it's good.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - I'll see how I get on with Tess before making a decision about this. I do remember the excellent adaptation with Julie Christie and the sheep running off the cliff. (I don't think Julie Christie ran off the cliff. Just to clarify.)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 On the bookshelf, ready to go.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Definitely before I go anywhere near David Copperfield.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
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 - No thanks, looks a tad long...
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy Actually might try this one before Tess. Poor Far From The Madding Crowd, I don't know what it did to make me leave it to last.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie My sister insists that I must.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce I feel like I should at least try.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola Not yet but one day. Prbably need to leave a nice big gap after I have finished Les Miserables (see below).
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - Keep trying, keep giving up, keep intending to try again, so torn between an italic and a strike.
80 Possession - AS Byatt
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
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton Is this really considered a necessary book in life? I despair.
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad Though I didn't get on with The Secret Agent, but I'll give him another go this sounds so good.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - I love Iain Banks but was traumatised by descriptions of this book when I was too young to handle them. Maybe I will read it anyway.
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 - Hmm... maybe.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare If watching it counts! (And of course I will be seeing it again, only this time with binoculars. And probably a police escort.) Also, part of the Complete Works, see above. Who made this list?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - As coincidence would have it, this is actually the book I am reading at the moment, hence a half bold, half italics. It is BLOODY long. In fact it is so heavy in the hardback edition that I have that I can only read it sitting up in bed with the book resting on my knees, which means that I have to be reading another book at all times which fits into my handbag. It's slow going, but it is good, although I could do without Hugo constantly stopping the action to give you 500 pages on the Napoleonic wars. Reminiscent of Dan Brown in fact. And yet not.
So there you go. About 70 out of 100, if you include the ones I tried and gave up on. It's slightly depressing that the average adult has only read 6 of these, because if they are using me as one of the sample that means a hell of a lot of people haven't read any of them, not even Winnie The Pooh, and a childhood without Winnie The Pooh is too bleak to contemplate. You'll notice I haven't underlined any, that's because it's actually an excellent list and anything I haven't crossed out I thoroughly enjoyed. Do feel like giving a bit of a special shout to Little Women, Catch 22 and Pride and Prejudice, though. Oh, and A Prayer For Owen Meany. And Lolita. And - hang on, there was a *reason* I gave up on the underlining...
As for passing the meme along, I'll suggest Big Mouth because there's every chance he's read the lot, and also because no excuse is ever spared to get him slagging off Midnight's Children again.
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12 comments:
oh, I want to do this but am currently blogless. Hmm. Maybe this should spur me on to starting my new blog. Which is currently title and focus-less. Oh. Anyhow, do read The Count of Monte Cristo, tis fab. And if you don't love The Shadow of the Wind I shall cry.
I may do this. But meanwhile, I'm just mortified on your behalf that someone spoiled the end of Anna Karenina for you. I was one of the people who (until I read it for myself) didn't know what happened at the end and not knowing does add a certain something to the experience. That aside, it remains my favourite novel ever. But then I am a bit of a Russophile, so you can rest assured both Crime And Punishment and War And Peace will be bolded on my list :)
. . .it pays to keep her on side. . . .
That's right, or I'll start signing in as "Anonymous" and giving you hell!
I believe the reason why these Big Read guys doubled up on Hamlet and the complete works of Shakespeare, then LWaW and all the Narnia books was to give those that hadn't read the complete canon of either a chance to register that they had at least read the most popular of each.
Christmas Carol takes about half an hour to read; it's a novella. G'wan....
Coincidentally, the house I'm sitting for the summer in Victoria has a rather large library in the bedroom containing rather a lot of the Big Read titles (they're an earnest kind of a family), so I pulled three that I haven't read (and hadn't intended to read): A Fine Balance for bus rides; Possession for the bathroom; and The Kite Runner by the bed. I want to see which ones have reeled me in by the end of the month when we leave as I doubt I'll have finished any of them. So far, I'm most engrossed by A Fine Balance (yay, Canada!), with Possession next, but I'm quite enjoying The Kite Runner so far as well...
(I loved Enid Blyton until I was twelve and twigged that most of her little kid detectives were xenophobic snots.)
My total is about 50.
Nice to see lots of Jane Austen on the list.
Please try Dune - I first read it in '75ish and still have it on my shelf. The movie is either loved or hated. I am in the second camp.
Some of these titles I read as a child - I had forgotten about Swallows and Amazons.
I tend not to read the "tomes" (i.e. big heavy books I can't read in bed or put in my purse, books of all sizes that require a thesaurus, dictionary and google to understand, books with key passages written in German/Latin etc )
I was surprised by how many of these I had read. Like you I stopped partway through the Da Vinci Code. I rarely don't finish a book once started, but what utter drivel.
I would recommend that you read the Three Musketeers - I've read both the original French version and the English translation. Both are excellent. Not as good as Cyrano, but there you go. Mind you, it is all about swashbuckling, cardinals, war and beautiful women, so maybe not your cup of tea.
No Earthsea in the list, which renders it wholly without merit! ;)
Ps, yes it's me, Bro - I'd forgotten that I'd set up a blogger account ages ago.
Great blog! Of course, you've probably already discovered by now that this list is from the U.K. and compiled by the BBC. In the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read, the NEA gives grants to communities for "one book, one community" programs. The communities then choose from a few dozen (not these 100) books selected by the NEA. Just thought NEA and the Big Read communities should get their just due!
Well I make mine 55, including those which were read to me, rather than those I read myself (e.g. Charlotte's Web and The Hobbit). I have skipped another 10 or so which I started but didn't get on with. In a couple of cases this is making me feel guilty! How bizarre and unwelcome and how very middle-class.
However, The List itself irritates me since the authors of some of my favourite novels aren't even represented on it (Virginia Woolf, E.M. Forster, Henry James). Additionally, the list has a highly anglo-saxon bias: perhaps it would have been better if it set out to be 100 novels written in the English language. As it is, the token presence of some French and Russian novels (mainly) looks odd highlights absence of e.g. Thomas Mann, Gunter Grass, Theodore Fontane. As Elle Woods would say, "I object".
Pedro
Interesting list, I was depressed to realize I have only read 21 of those. But among them was "War and Peace", "Ann Karenins","Les Misérables" and "The Three Musketeers". I was also disappointed that the list failed to mention anything by PG Wodehouse, Elizabeth Gaskell, Pearl S Buck or Gene Stratton Porter. Or a few of my other favorite books like "Shirley","The Brothers Karamazov" and "The Scarlet Pimpernel".
I now feel very stupid after reading that list and knowing how many i havent read.
I read Anna Karenina on the back of having seen the TV adaptation with Dougie Henshall playing Levin (yeah, I'm shallow). But I loved the book and thoroughly enjoyed it - even the farming stuff.
Was Bro being ironic about the Earthsea Quartet? I'd certainly put that ahead of any Blyton, or frankly Tolkein or Dune. The Woman in White was our set text for O level: remarkably I adored it. That seems fairly uncommon for school set texts.
ok so now you have enough book recommendations to keep you going for the rest of your life, but I want to speak up for Dracula - it is very good and some parts genuinely disturbing. I recommend it (and it's going to be more fun than trying to read the entire works of shakespeare).
@lisa R: no irony intended - they are my favourite works of fantasy fiction. Incidentally, it's a sextet rather than a quartet now - she released 2 new books fairly recently.
Marie: no "Lone Bagpipe". what were they thinking of! ;)
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