Wednesday, July 16, 2008

How many have you done?

My wonderful friend Katie sent me this meme that of course I just had to do. It's the Top 100 list of books from The Big Read, which was a UK project in 2003 to find the nation's 100 most loved books.

The survey found that on average most people have read six or fewer books from the list. Of course, I took that information as a personal challenge. I've read way more than six, and someone should know it!

Here's the key:

Bold text = I’ve read it
♥ = I’ve read it and loved it
▓ = It’s on my TBR pile


And here's the meme:

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
♥ To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (bits of it back in my God botherer days)
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
▓ Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (okay not all, but some)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I don’t remember reading this as a kid so have decided to do so as an adult)
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
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
♥ Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
♥ Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (no childhood is complete without Mr Sanders!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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
Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
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
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
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
♥ The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
♥ 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
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
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
♥ 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


You will probably have noticed a complete dearth of reading of the classics. My shameful reading secret! I know that in some reading circles that is a crime that will have you excommunicated but I have just never got around to them and for some reason, am not all that compelled to either.

5 comments:

Heather said...

Well my rather embarassing count is 12 but that's still double their figure I guess, plus some of them arent one work like shakespeare (why does Hamlet get his own number?)and the Far away tree series.

I think I'd have been horrified if you'd only done six or less of these lol.

Fun list, thanks for sharing!

Karla said...

Ok unless I am hideously blind I did not see any of the master Ernest Hemmingway, what 100 list is complete without a 'when the bell tolls' or 'the garden of eden'

Matt B said...

I see On the Road isn't bold...Stanley will not be impressed. 1984 too, that's nearly crimethink. I came in at 16. I'd like to see a kiwi's favourite 100 list-Stonedogs would be there no doubt.

sarah said...

41. I think.

I'm going to buy a book (such a treat!!!!) tonight out of one of your recommendations, if I can find one. Just have to find one that REALLY sounds good! :D

Caffeinated Weka said...

Ooh - I'm just looking through this list and preparing a blog post about it as we speak! I think I've read 26, but will check and post shortly ...