Are You Well-Read?

Amy did a post a while back about the National Endowment for the Arts' Big Read Top 100 List. Apparently, their theory is that the average person has read 6 of the top 100. They are hoping to encourage people to read more - always a worthy goal.

To participate in this little (show-off) event (now, would you really list it on your blog if you had only read one out of the hundred????), you copy the list and then bold the ones you have read. Amy added the interesting elements of providing personal comments about the books and also underlining books that she LOVED! I like how she did it, so I'm going to copy her magnificent style! Instead of underlining, I will star my favorites.

Here's how I fared:

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 (I've only read half of them, but do intend to finish the series)

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 (started, but due back to the library - will check it out again)

10 *Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (for a long time, was my favorite book)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott

12 *Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (though I have read A LOT of them - a dozen of the plays and all of the sonnets and poems)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (loved the movie - should read the book - even own it already)
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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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 (can you believe I haven't yet????)

34 Emma - Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (part of Chronicles, so why separate? but it works for me, since I've only read this one of the series)

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's Diary - Helen Fielding (have seen the movie, never read it)

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 (I know I read much of it, but can't remember if I finished it before going to see a play of it in Oxford)

80 Possession - A. S. 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 (again, saw the movie, never read the book)

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 (Seriously? this book is on here?)

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 (Why include this if complete works is above? Not sure)

99 *Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 *Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (though, I read the abridged version - I was a senior in high school at the time. Loved the movie version and was thrilled to see the London production from the second row!!!)

40/100

Not as good as Amy (she had roughly 49). Must get reading!