book list

[gilana]

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 only read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Weird list. I've read most of the kids books, at least. So, anyone have any recommendations for any of these I should give a try?

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 (in Hebrew, but that should count double!)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (tried, couldn't get into it)
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
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 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 (why is this separate from #33?)
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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I *think* I've read this, can't remember any details.)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (hated this with a passion, and had to read it two years running in school.)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (Tried, didn't like it.)
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 Burnet (Just bought this to give to my niece)
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 (in both French and English; I prefer the French.)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (tried, failed.)
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

Comments

[magid.livejournal.com]

And why is 98 separate from 14?

I really like most of Bill Bryson's writings, both travel and language.

[smacaski.livejournal.com]

As I mentioned in my list, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books--it's a romance/action/revenge story... lots of underhanded goings-on, improbable connections between characters, etc. etc. It's fun.

Also, I love Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I haven't read Love in the Time of Cholera yet, but I loved One Hundred Years of Solitude. The writing, even in translation, is amazingly beautiful. You might want to try some of his shorter, less dense works first, like Of Love and Other Demons or Memories of My Melancholy Whores, both of which I greatly enjoyed.

I'm also a fan of Nabokov, although I think Lolita is a bit overrated. Pale Fire is much better, and Pnin is sweet, for a Nabokov story. Invitation to a Beheading is good, too, if you like surrealism and situations that make no sense whatsoever.

I own almost all of the books I've mentioned, so if you ever want to borrow any, let me know.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

Heh, I was going to say almost the same thing -- One Hundred Years of Solitude and Lolita (I *love* Lolita, I admit). I think I'd also add The Bell Jar.
I've been wanting to read Memories of My Melancholy Whores -- I might ask to borrow it some time. And Invitation to a Beheading sounds kinda awesome...

[smacaski.livejournal.com]

Don't get me wrong--I think Lolita is very very good, but I think it gets attention more for its subject matter than its writing. Pale Fire is just wonderful to read--well written, sad, beautiful, sarcastic, and absurd.

And yes, Invitation to a Beheading is a fabulous title. A pretty good novel, too.

[ayelle.livejournal.com]

That's probably true, although for me it's the beauty of the writing that makes the subject matter bearable. (Putting it that way is a simplification, but still.) Pale Fire has been on my reading list for a long time; I'll bump it up a few more notches based on your rec, as you have excellent taste (or in any case, very complementary to mine).

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

I'll third The Count of Monte Cristo, add encouragement on The Time-Traveler's Wife, and suggest that I think Persuasion might work well for you now. If you need any encouragement on the latter, it's a book I love to talk about.

[cos]

Persuasion was my least favorite Austen. I found it very disappointing.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Would you care to discuss why? I'm also curious as to how old you were when you read it, as I have a theory that it reads much better at, say, thirty-five than it does at twenty-five.

[cos]

Huh. I read it just a year or two ago, so either 35 or 36. Can't remember clearly enough right now to detail what I didn't like about it.

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

Ah well, there goes that theory :)

[gilana]

Do you have any of these that I could borrow?

[lillibet.livejournal.com]

All of them. I don't think I can get to your place before we leave tomorrow, although I'll try to keep it in mind. But I'd be delighted to deliver them next week if I don't.

[gilana]

Sounds great, thanks! Where are you going?

[kjc007.livejournal.com]

I loved The Three Musketeers. It was so much fun to read the whole thing versus seeing various movie versions, which pick & choose the scenes to portray.

Also, I've never seen any movie do the drunken basement scene funnier than the original writing.

Stoker's Dracula starts off marvelously, then falls apart once VanHelsing is on stage. It slows down and gets wrung out and confusing. There are several good scenes in the latter part of the book, and it finishes well, but it drags a bit. Everybody's so complimentary of everybody else as being brave and true and bold and noble and good...

However, it was awesome to have read the source material for so much of the vampire stories. And, as Regis likes to say, it's a triumph of technology as the use of the most up-to-date tech of the time helps them get and stay organized in their battle against THE MONSTER!

Along the same lines, I recommend Frankenstein. Very interesting to have the source or inspiration material for so much literature that came after. And nothing like any of the movies.

A Christmas Carol is super short. Worth the time.

[chanaleh.livejournal.com]

I'm totally doing this later. Unfortunately, I can't for the life of me remember which Dickenses and Austens I managed to read and which ones I skipped, in my high school BritLit phase. :-) Pity there's no semibold for "partial read" or "might have read"!

[oscherub.livejournal.com]

Try Like Water for Chocolate. It is beautifully written and very sensual to boot.