The Big Read Meme...

[lebateleur]

...in lieu of a What Am I Reading Wednesday, for which I wrote and then managed to delete about 3,000 words with an inadvertent touchpad gesture on an unfamiliar computer. 🤬 I will attempt to rewrite it, but in the meantime this popped up in my reading list, courtesy of meridian_rose.


"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed." I gather this list is somewhat dated, but I have dutifully recorded how my reading matches up against it, with some minor tweaks to the notation system.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read started but never finished.

3) Underline the books you LOVE."

I have also struck through the books I loathed. So without further ado:

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 1984 - 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'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

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

Some takeaways:

• I've read 38 of these books cover-to-cover and attempted to read nine more.
• That works out to more than 50 volumes, because (even counting The Lord of the Rings as a single book as Tolkien intended) the list sometimes treats series or anthologies as single entries.
• I was made to read a lot of Straight Men Writing Very Serious LITERATURE during my compulsory schooling.
• Turns out, I do not really care for Straight Men Writing Very Serious LITERATURE.
  
  これで以上です。

Comments

[shipperslist]

I was made to read a lot of Straight Men Writing Very Serious LITERATURE during my compulsory schooling.
Turns out, I do not really care for Straight Men Writing Very Serious LITERATURE.

I feel you, ma fren.

[lebateleur]

I get the feeling from my broad reading list that we are not alone in this either...

[meridian_rose]

From other comments on my entry I've concluded that this list of books people 'love' is a lot of required reading, and might be "books I remember reading" and "books I'll admit to having read".

[lebateleur]

With a few "I hear the wimmin and youths read this one!" titles thrown in for "broad appeal", yup.

[pauraque]

It seems odd to have both Hamlet and The Complete Works of Shakespeare on their list. But considering they also have The Da Vinci Code on there somehow, it's probably safe to say I don't understand their criteria.

[lebateleur]

I'm guessing the criteria is "Books we actually think are good (i.e., "The Canon") with a few titles popular among "niche" demographics (women, adolescents, general readers) thrown in to try to increase the appeal.

And yeah, the inconsistencies irked me too. "His Dark Materials", but "The Harry Potter series", but an individual work and collection by both Lewis and Shakespeare, but all of Austen's works listed separately? Come on, guys...