NEA Big Read meme

[sylvar]

[When reposting, please link to http://www.neabigread.org/ ]
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) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE, and strikeout the books you read but didn't like.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only 6 or less and make them read.

[I've read only parts of some of these, so I've bolded only parts of them, roughly proportionally.]

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 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 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 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
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

[shlafe.livejournal.com]

geez, I read seven of the first ten.

[shlafe.livejournal.com]

...it also lists the complete works of William Shakespeare and Hamlet separately, as well as the chronicals of Narnia and The Lion, Witch and Wardrobe. Hmmm.

[technomom]

I did the same meme fairly recently, but I was too lazy to look it up. It didn't come to me with the 6 books figure or the link. I just counted, and I've read 38 of them.

My family of origin are some of those people who pull the average down, though. My brother - an MD - brags that he's only read one book completely in his entire life (some dreck about Mother Teresa). My father just doesn't read, except for the Bible and his Sunday School lessons. I'm willing to bet that the Bible is the only book on that list that he has ever read. Mom says she loves reading, but pretty much sticks to the same material as Daddy, with a newspaper and a few magazines tossed in. I know that she has read Gone With the Wind, because it's her favorite book. My sister (a vice-principal)--well, if she's read ONE book completely in her life, I'd be shocked.

And they're considered the "educated" part of their huge extended families!

[sylvar.livejournal.com]

I'm hoping he forgot about Gray's Anatomy.

[technomom]

I seriously doubt that he did.

[discogravy.livejournal.com]

This reminds me that I need to re-read Confederacy of Dunces. Ms Camacho gave it to me in 95 or 96. I heard it was being made into a movie starring Wil Ferrel, which might make it genius or the type of dreck that people walk out of because they started drooling.

I'm kind of surprised you didn't go through the narnia books and just stopped at the first one (the christian stuff is a bit more overt in the latter ones) and no Dickens. Seriously: how'd you make it through high school without reading lord of the flies or dickens?

Also, finish up dune and lotr dude (but skip everything else frank herbert did unless you capital-L Love Dune -- he's good, but Dune is far and away the masterpiece. Although if you know his personal history, the ending of the series that he started writing¹ -- the 6th book, written when while his wife died, has a slant of ...feminist is too political a word, really, but it really shows how much he loved and missed her, and by extension all women. THAT SAID, Dune is the one that stands alone as a piece of I-can't-believe-you-held-that-together-so-well art, whereas the others are basically "so...people liked the first one? let's use it's idea to expound on other subjects!" -- the first is really heavy on ecology and what passed for psychology/politics in 60's/70's sci-fi.

Similarly, JRR Tolkien's masterpiece is the famous book or two (hobbit and lotr,) with everything else being strictly for fans (or hardcore philologists).

^{1. Not the bullshit that his kid hired some hack to put together for bucks -- for an astute analysis of this, please c.f. Penny Arcade's review of the post-Frank Herbert Dune books}

[srmm.livejournal.com]

When I have more time I'll have to split this up into books I read before I was 16 (1980) and after. There are loads on here I've read, but I'm guessing an 80/20 split on high school. There's another list like this I've seen recently with fewer classics and more ideas of things to read.