Please forgive me for stealing this from a favorite blogger of mine. 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 really do love to read and I thought found it interesting just how many I've read and/or started/in progress. The majority of the classics I've read, I owe to my 11th and 12th grade English Literature class teacher, Mrs. Rita Weiss.
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.)
3) 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
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 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 (en francais)
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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais)
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
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6 comments:
Ya know.....I read some of these because of my english/lit teacher too and I read some of the Harry Potter books and of course I read the Divinci Code but I'm a fan of James Patterson, Lori Foster, Danielle Steele, Janet Evanovich, Lori Avacoto, and there's more but I can't remember them....
I don't think I will ever read half of those. Just not my style.
So, read my post today and then get involved in my challenge. You can do it! Especially after reading today's post.
Oh wow. I've only read 20 of them. And there are quite a few books on that list I've bought but still haven't read. But looks like I need to get on the stick!
Ironically, I hadn't read most of them due to school. We had a sitter for Seth years ago who'd always be reading some classic for high school English. And I thought, "We didn't have to read that in school. But maybe I should since there are 16 year olds out there who are far better read than I am." SO I started reading.
Great list. Infuses some classics with some great modern novels. Like that.
your fav blogger is one of my favorite bloggers too I bet.. I haven't done this yet but It hink I will...
check you out - your a leader! and you have the best followers ME!! ha! Great to meet you!
Um, I hate to inform you but I can no longer claim you as a friend. Anyone not even having the intention of reading Hitch Hiker's Guide is, well, dangerously sane.
It has been wonderful knowing you.
If you eventually succumb to peer pressure and read it (feel me pushing yet?) then let me know. I won't hold a grudge.
Oh and that list is funny. Shakespeare gets two (or ONLY two) slots. I can't tell which I'm more confused by.
Oh-oh Jaden and I just finished Lord of the Flies so he is making some good progress on that list even though he can't read what I'm typing for the most part. Uh, he just bonked me on the head. Maybe he can.
I'm surprised they think the average person has only read 6 things from this list. My dh and I have both read 26 and most of that was in high school and some in college. I haven't read any of it in at least 10 years. I also found it odd that there were some duplicates on the list, for example "the complete works of Shakespeare" and then later, "Hamlet".
You haven't lived until you've read To Kill A Mockingbird.
And who made up that list? Some entries make no sense.
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