The Big Read Meme

[nmg]

It's doing the rounds, and I'm a sucker for memes like this:

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see."

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 so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

Quite a few read - more than I would have thought at first, but some glaring gaps which I've been meaning to fill for years (my inability to read any Dickens bar the Mudfog Papers, for example).

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
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
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
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
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
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' 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 (started, but not finished)
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
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[marklesuk.livejournal.com]

how can yo unot have read sherlock holmes!!!!!!

lil

[nmg.livejournal.com]

Easy - I spent all my time reading Raymond Chandler instead.

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

Haha, that is so the right answer!
I went on the Elmore Leonard from there...

[gnommi.livejournal.com]

Actually The Bible has some pretty good bits. It certainly doesn't slack on the visual metaphors. ;)
Rebecca was AMAZING. You should totally read Holmes.
I wish I'd never read Wuthering Heights: Moby Dick, on the other hand was really worth the slog. Emma also has its moments.
I've read the Complete Works of Lewis Carroll I think more than any other books. I have them in one not-very-slim volume (including the story-form maths problems) if you care to borrow.
I actually really enjoyed The Bell Jar too.

How come Hamlet and the Complete Works are separate?

[elseware.livejournal.com]

I've read 18. But I've read a few more books than that in total. It was proabably into 4 digits by the time I left home.

I've sat *near* dr. nick when he was reading Moby Dick.

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Moby Dick was worth it. It's worth it just for the miscellaneous stuff about whaling. I doubt it's worth Nick reading "Catcher..." now, because he's not a teenager any more even in spirit. It was really good when I read it close to Holden's age but I suspect I wouldn't really enjoy it now.

What sort of "top 100" is this anyway? I didn't like Wasp Factory anywhere near as much as "Whit" or, to be more mainstream, "The Bridge" (or way less mainstream "Excession") so I doubt it's about popularity. On the other hand, from a literary point of view, how do we end up with "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" but not (unless I missed it) "Alice in Wonderland" ?

There's the usual distaste for genre unless it has been sanctified as mainstream fiction, so we can have Lewis and Tolkien but no Vernor Vinge, no Phil Dick (and on this sort of list they wouldn't have felt obliged to pick the unreadable "Ubik"), no Raymond Chandler...

Is it just a question of movies? I'm a bit scared now, looking at the list. Moby Dick? Check. Shakespeare? Check. His Dark Materials? Check. Wuthering Heights? Check. Catch 22? Check. Oh dear. This is a list of movies, some great movies of not so great books, and some terrible movies of novels that should never have gone near the big screen. Still doesn't explain choosing Charlie over Alice, since both were made into mediocre movies - nor the lack of Phil Dick now that I come to think about it.

Oh, and Rebecaa won't be the same after I saw that comedy sketch that has it backwards, with the first wife gradually becoming aware that actually everyone is waiting for her successor who they much prefer.

[tlrmx.org (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, I'm just a ditz. Alice is in there.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I'd still like to read Catcher in the Rye, even though I'm no longer a teenager.

There are other books that I haven't read, and which I now suspect I couldn't read; E.E. "Doc" Smith's work falls into this category.

Here's mine

[(Anonymous)]

Damn you, you're 5 books past me...

https://carfax.org.uk/node/36 (https://carfax.org.uk/node/36)

Hugo.

[rdmaughan.livejournal.com]

Top 100 books by what criteria? Popular vote, number sold, critic selection or some other criteria?

The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?

[ahnlak.livejournal.com]

The problem is that the list isn't quite the same as the BBC's "Big Read" top 100, and it looks like someone has half-heartedly tried to condense series - for example, on the original there are four Harry Potters listed indivudually, which seems to have become a single "Hary Potter series" entry.

[jacint.livejournal.com]

Also, it seems a little out of order. I think it's right that HP and Narnia are condensed, though.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure of the provenance of this list (I saw it first about a week ago); it clearly isn't quite the Big Read list, although much of the remainder is still there.

[nmg.livejournal.com]

If it's actually based on the Big Read, that would make it popular vote.

[adela-terrell.livejournal.com]

I've read 50 of them, but aren't 6 all Harry Potter?? that is just cheating, thats not real reading. I am nearly finishing Rebecca at the minute, why didn't someone sit on me and make me read it before!!!!

Not worth copying a hundred to highlight four.

[lionsphil.livejournal.com]

8, 47, 49, 81. Why is "Hamlet" not under "Complete works of"?

Given how much I enjoyed 8, I should locate and read 58. 47 is easily the worst book I've ever been forced to read. 49 is ace, and if you'd rather absorb it via the medium of film, you want the old black-and-white one if memory serves.

The weird thing about reading 81 is that you realise that the Muppet film adaptation is actually closer to the novel, at least in terms of dialogue, than quite a few "serious" adaptations.