I’m a reading fool!
November 19, 2010 § Leave a Comment
A friend of mine (Hi, BiblioVixen/SumoKnitter!) posted this on Facebook. I thought it was appropriate for this venue, so I decided to post it here rather than in a note on Facebook. I did post this list once before, about a year and a half ago. I’ll summarize the difference in the results below. I’ll also comment on some individual books throughout the list.
It’s a strange list of books, really. For example, why in the world would Dan Brown be in the same list as William Shakespeare, or Carlos Ruiz Zafon? All this makes sense when you think that the list is of Britain’s favorite novels, voted on in 2003 (see the original blog post mentioned below).
***Begin list!***
“Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions:
-Copy this into your NOTES.
-Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
-Underline the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
-Tag other book nerds.”
(By the way, it’s just a meme – have fun with it! It was probably created from this original BBC post in 2004 -
http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
)
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 – SUCH a good book, especially if you listen to it read by Sissie Spacek
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 – I definitely feel like I should have made it through this at some time. I loved the movie!
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 – A real let-down, after reading TLOTR trilogy.
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger – I hope it’s more satisfying than Her Fearful Symmetry
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell – I was too young to appreciate it, I think, when I tried to read it (like, 9)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
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 — Currently reading!
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
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 – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown — Really?
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
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan — I thought the movie was fantastic, so I’ll hopefully read this soon.
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 OMG — Favorite!
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 – I’ve heard it’s overrated
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding – Really?
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker – It bored me, but I nearly got through
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett – Currently reading!
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce – I’ve heard it’s maddening to read
76 The Inferno – Dante
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 – E.B. 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
2009
22 read in full or part (at that time, I did not count Gone with the Wind, because I had barely gotten in to it so long ago. This time, I did)
2010
25 Read in full
13 Read in part
Not too shabby, really, for a year and a half. Especially since I was definitely not working on this list specifically. It just so happened that this list contains a lot of books that I mean to read, or read again.
How do you score?
