Book thingy

[nycmermaid]

Because I want to show you all how I am possibly the worst-read English major ever. If anyone particularly recommends any of these that I don't have bolded or italicized, do tell. I don't even know what some of them are about.

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 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
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
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 [All of them?? Come on!]
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's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame [I don't think I ever actually read this, but still want to list it as a favorite.]
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis [But the first book is on here separately!?]
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
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
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
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 [This story really captures the essence of what I feel "magic" is and what being "pagan" means to me.]
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 [No fair to have this as well as Shakespeare's complete works.]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


My added honorable mentions that ought to be on this list but aren't:
Sons and Lovers - DH Lawrence
The Oz Series - L Frank Baum

Comments

[plastic-cowgirl.livejournal.com]

I've read 20, wow I'm proud!!

Erm. I would definitely recommended The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, The Bell Jar and 1984. I didn't like the 5 people you meet in heaven too much, and the wasp factory is just plain fucking weird!

[abitunlikely.livejournal.com]

I've read a lot more than I expected, too. Didn't count them, though.

I thought The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time was really overrated. :/ I actually didn't even finish it, I got tired of it when I was almost all the way through.

[plastic-cowgirl.livejournal.com]

Haha I'm just a loser :P

I really liked it, thought it was dead easy to read and quite different. I think i preferred it the second time though and I think Mark Haddon's second book is a LOT better. Think it was overly hyped, but yeah, most things are!

[cynima.livejournal.com]

You should totally read The Time Traveler's Wife!!! It's soooo good!

[sarahsez00.livejournal.com]

I thought that book was a load of overly sentimental crap. And the fact that he knew her when she was like 5 and he was in his 20's, I thought created/added to some weird sexual stuff.

[cynima.livejournal.com]

You're entitled to your opinion, but I totally disagree with it in this case. I thought it was possibly the most unique and complex love story I'd ever read. I thought it was sexy and spiritual and it really resonated with me.

[abitunlikely.livejournal.com]

I decided to check out the imdb page for the movie to see what kind of progress it's making (due out in December!), and I was reading the message board for it. People were asking who you imagined playing the parts, and someone wrote Christian Bale fore Henry, and I went,"OH MY GOD YES!!!" :(

[cynima.livejournal.com]

OH.MY.GOD. That is something I never even imagined, but holy wow, that would be so freaking amazing!!!

[abitunlikely.livejournal.com]

I know! It makes me cry for how good he would have been!! :'(

Someone on the boards saw an advanced screening and said that Bana was okay but that McAdams was actually excellent, so I'm hoping that's true, because I would hate to hate both of them, even if I wouldn't have cast either of them.

Btw, I think no one ever gets my emails, I replied to yours but no one seems to have replied to my reply...

[webmd.livejournal.com]

This may be the case, as I have not yet seen your reply either.

[webmd.livejournal.com]

Cancel that, I did see it (the thing about being allergic to most nature, right?).

[sarahsez00.livejournal.com]

Whats wrong with Eric Bana? He's really hot and he's a good actor. Hello Chopper!

[sarahsez00.livejournal.com]

Who are these adults that have only read 6 of these books? What terrible schools did they go to? And what happened to The Scarlet Letter?

[webmd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I was wondering about the Scarlet Letter too.

[zalem.livejournal.com]

I'm embarrassed I haven't read more of these. ^^;;;;

[webmd.livejournal.com]

I'm surprised too, miss phi beta whatever!

Did you graduate law school yet?

[zalem.livejournal.com]

I think I used a lot of cliffnotes. lol. I cheated my way out of reading stuff for school. Hahahaha!

No, I still have another year to go. Bleh.

[osito71.livejournal.com]

I posted something similar not too long ago, that that list was of the top 106 books recommended but left unread by most - or something like that.

[webmd.livejournal.com]

I've read only about 16 of the books on that list. I bow to anyone who was able to get through the Silmarillion. I really wanted to, but gave up after multiple attempts.

[zalem.livejournal.com]

Hey, I like the Silmarillion.

[webmd.livejournal.com]

I wanted to like it, and probably would like it if someone made it into a movie or something... but I just couldn't get through reading it. My brain couldn't handle it. It was like reading the Bible.

[osito71.livejournal.com]

Ha!

I was about to come and say, it's like reading the Bible!

Which is why I like, I guess. . . ;)

[osito71.livejournal.com]

Oh and by the way, I've read 36 of these.

[imajinnaire.livejournal.com]

I've read 41 - whoo-hoo!

Only 14...

[cuphoenix.livejournal.com]

...I was a computer science major.. the only books I was allowed to read were manuals. :/

Ah well.. I'm making up for it by reading Albert Camus' The Plague.. that I bought at The Strand. :)