Liz posted this on her blog (as did Liz, Kristine and Carrie), and I'm jumping on board.
Apparently, the Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list. I went on the Web site and tried to find this list (and the NEA's thing about the average adult only having read six), but I couldn't find it. Nonetheless, it's a fun list! I've read 45 of them.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished. Has anyone I know ever finished Ulysses? Please speak up so I can bow at your feet ...)
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"
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 Have read the first of the trilogy, but not the rest.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller6
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 Meany - 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
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 (And I LOVED "A Little Princess.")
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
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 (Does it count that I read the abridged version?)
about me
I'm Emilie, a writer and mother to two young boys, married to my best friend and living in St. Paul, Minnesota. I was diagnosed with a soft-tissue sarcoma in August 2007, while pregnant with our youngest son. Cancer sucks. But we are trying to live life to the fullest in spite of it.
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lemmondrops ~ the books!
14 comments:
I have read 18 of them, so I guess I'm above average. I am totally impressed that you have read 44 of them!
I have read 50 of them so far, but I am a ravenousness reader. :)
I love the list!
Like the other Rebecca I have also read 18. Thanks for posting that list - now I have something to take with me to the bookstore when I don't have any idea what to read next.
Rebecca
68- mostly the older titles. All of Dickens, Wilkie Collins, all of Austin and Bronte, etc.
That Columbia English Lit thing, right?
Lots of love,
Veronica
Gosh I love books :) I didn't count exactly how many of them I have read, but it's a lot. And if you want to borrow the rest of the His Dark Materials series, let me know. I would need them back though, because I LOVE those books! The 2nd one, The Subtle Knife, is the best. Even better then The Golden Compass.
Ok, I counted, and I've read 26 - but of those 3 are series so I guess it's more like 40 books :) Harry Potter was 7 books!
I have the dubious honor of having finished Ulysses - not by choice. :)
I'm so happy you haven't had to read #91. Yuck.
Uh, I've read fewer than 20 on this list but that's not to say that I haven't read other great pieces that SHOULD be on this list.
You ladies are quite the accomplished readers. i have only hit 16 of those..
39, roughly, and most of them in high school and middle school. My memory is going though; did I read "Tess" or did I only read excerpts of it in French class? Did I read "Catch 22" or only think I did? "Of Mice and Men?" I THINK I read it, but did I finish it? If I own the book but never read it and have no intention ("Owen Meanie"), does it count? And what if I quit the Harry Potter series around book 5 and didn't finish all the Narnia books? So complicated.
I want to show the list to my husband who claims he didn't read ANY of the books in his h.s. lit classes. I'm still not sure how he pulled that off.
Liz, I remember being oddly fascinated by "Heart of Darkness." I thought "Lord of the Flies" was much worse.
What a good thing to think about during nap time. It's lots more fun than the laundry and dishes I should be doing. Thanks, Emilie!
--Laura S.
Thank you for posting this! I've read 29 of the books. I look forward to seeing what others have enjoyed and reading those.
Hope you are feeling good today!
26--but I'm commenting to encourage everyone to read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. It's a fantastic (and quick) book that everyone should read. My number should be higher; most of the titles are ones I've always meant to read but just haven't.
Charles
Only read 22 that I can remember. Read parts of some others and stopped from boredom. I think the Potter series should count as 7 and Shakespeare should count as 1 million.
Leigh
Thank you for this wonderful list! I've read 42, but I feel terrible that I haven't read more of them.
I do agree with your comment about #91, Liz. If tedious needs a definition, it's Heart of Darkness.
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