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Book Meme

  • 25th Jun, 2008 at 12:03 PM
Sexy by Patches
Ganked from [info]bastett:

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) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ (if you are that bored).

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 [Should this really be here?]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [I've probably read most of it, though not in order, or from cover to cover - but I'm counting it.]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [Not because I had to in high school!]
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 [Started it, never finished.]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [I've got it, I've read quite a few plays - but certainly not all, or even enough to count it.]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [I forced myself to finish this - boring!]
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [I have heard good things!]
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 [One day.]
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [One day.]
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [I think I started it and never finished.]
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 [Which is one book in The Chronicles of Narnia per #33, but OK.]
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 [Not because I had to in high school!]
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [Why is this on here? This is not great literature.]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving [Read most of it, never finished. Didn't grab my attention, for the most part. Only the dialogue between the children was really interesting. I sorta feel like Is hould finish it, since I got so close.]
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 [Required high school reading.]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [I was told by several people that this book would change my life, and my stance on religion. It did not - though it was a good read.]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert [This seems like SUCH a commitment!]
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen [I tried. I couldn't get past page 10.]
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [I was supposed to read this in high school. Could not get through it. Relied on Cole's Notes.]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [Not because I had to in high school!]
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 [Required high school reading. Not too bad.]
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 [I thoroughly enjoyed The Satanic Verses, then I got partway into this one but never finished. [info]saviolo raves about it.]
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 [Boring.]
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 [Conrad's Lord Jim - which I had to read in high school - was the most confusing book I have ever attempted to read. I eventually relied completely on Cole's Notes without finishing the book. I want to try this one, which I hear is better anyway.]
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupéry [In both French and English. This is truly one of few books I can say that I "love". It is incredible.]
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 [One of the worst books I ahve ever read was Shute's On The Beach - because I had to in high school! I can only hope that this one is not so awful.]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare [Would this not be included in The Complete Works of Shakespeare in #14? Yes, yes it would.]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, that's 24 of the 100 that I have read, 4 that I love, and 19 that I intend to (finish) read(ing).

Also, where is Umberto Eco on this list? His are some of the best books I've ever read - not In The Name of the Rose as much, though it was good, but Foucault's Pendulum and Island of the Day Before were absolutely fantastic. I need to pick up his latest.

The Dark is Rising series by Susan Cooper should be on this list well before the likes of Dan Brown. I think David Eggers and Mark Z. Danielewski should also be considered.

Finally, nomination for worst novel ever: "Settlers of the Marsh" by Frederick Philip Grove, which I had to read in high school in Manitoba because it was written about the damn place. Horrible. The most pointless book that I wish I had burned before I finished reading.

B.

Comments

[info]megadog wrote:
25th Jun, 2008 16:59 (UTC)
That list comprises almost totally fiction, which explains why my score would be extremely low [probably about five read, none intend-to-read].

Now, if the list included the likes of This or This or This or This I'd be in with a chance. Truth is, I don't really find fiction interesting if the alternative of something real is available.

[info]branwyn wrote:
25th Jun, 2008 17:20 (UTC)
That is a very excellent point - it's all fiction! I hadn't even noticed, but it's true.

I wish I found educational reading more compelling - the books you've listed all look like they'd hold some very interesting information. Unfortunately, it is rare for me to find a book that deals with a technical subject without being incredibly, unpalatably dry. The closest are "history of science" books like James Gleick's Chaos: Making a New Science (which is a favourite) and Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything, which really only serve to whet the appetite for more technical details - which are inevitably found buried in a horrendously boring technical text.

But maybe it's better, for the good of humanity, that I don't have this sort of technical knowledge stewing about in my brain... ;)

B.
[info]footpad wrote:
25th Jun, 2008 23:39 (UTC)
I've recently been fascinated by Lee Smolin's The Life of the Cosmos, which discusses the likelihood that the structure of the universe, and even the very laws of nature, may be governed by self-organising processes like those that give rise to the complexity of life itself. It sounds dry, and sometimes it is heavy going, but once you've read it I don't think you can ever view the world quite the same way again. It's one of those books like Gödel, Escher, Bach, which really do change the way you think.

Speaking of which, it's time I read the second half of GEB. I'm going to buy myself a copy. Now.
[info]branwyn wrote:
26th Jun, 2008 13:38 (UTC)
I keep hearing about Gödel, Escher, Bach, and the Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it's right up my alley, for several reasons. Even the cover art is totally, totally my sort of thing. I will have to check this out!

The Life of the Cosmos sounds potentially interesting... and also potentially boring. We'll see I guess. ;)

B.
[info]footpad wrote:
26th Jun, 2008 00:02 (UTC)
Even on the softer non-fiction, books like Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water are works of a consummate beauty that can barely be rivalled even in fiction. (Bran?—I think I'd like to give you a copy of that one. I promise satisfaction.) And Koestler's The Act of Creation may contain some suspect philosophy, but it's still a glorious work of the mind.

Beauty is truth, and truth beauty. Fiction is always playing catch-up.
[info]footpad wrote:
26th Jun, 2008 00:05 (UTC)
Like you, I want to unscrew somebody's head for allowing Dan Brown on that list. Normally bad fiction doesn't bother me—don't like it, don't read it—but there was something about The Da Vinci Code that I really hated. I can't say I ever gave a damn for Enid Blyton, either. And yes, Harry Potter just ain't that good. And what the hell is Jane Austen doing peppering the list like that? Did I miss something?

I'm with you on the Susan Cooper, though. I'd also throw in two works of sci-fi: A Fire upon the Deep, by Vernor Vinge (one of my favourite books ever), and Excession, by Iain M. Banks.

Books in the list that I love:

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Captain Corelli's Mandolin (which I passionately recommend—it's nothing to do with that ghastly film. And de Bernières's Red Dog is an absolute jewel)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (I was fed Márquez while studying Spanish, and loved it)
Dune
The Count of Monte Cristo (rrrr, classic rip-roaring stuff!)

Edited at 2008-06-26 00:05 (UTC)
[info]branwyn wrote:
27th Jun, 2008 15:55 (UTC)
I didn't HATE The DaVinci Code - though I know at least one other person who disliked it with the same amount of vitriol as you seem to - but it really, REALLY does not belong in the company of the other books on this list.

B.

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