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!
4 comments:
Okay, I went through the list and I have read 54; in fact, I'm reading Atonement right now and am really enjoying it.
I might post this list in a few days...this was fun!
OK, you've gotta read the Narnia trilogy. You will LOVE it. Reading as an adult you pick up on all the subtle yet pervasive links to Christianity.
I did a bit more research on this list, and it is one that came from Britain in 2001. So...it's probably not all-encompassing, but I still think it's fun!
I'm only at 34 books-I better get cracking! Neat list to get ideas from. Some of the classic books I haven't read since high school or college and would be good to go back and read them again. ~Karin
Bia - I thought it was fun, too. I look forward to perusing what you have read. 54! Impressive!
Amy - By Narnia trilogy, do you mean the Chronicles books (more than 3, right?) or are you referring to Lewis's Silent Planet trilogy?
This was great fun - especially to see what books others have read from the list. I have such a hard time making definitive lists of what I have enjoyed reading because I always worry I will leave something significant out!
Karin - Still, a good third of the list! You're doing well!
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