Wednesday, October 8, 2008

The Big Read

Well, I'm stealing the idea for this post from my sister-in-law Natalie. There is a lot you can search on the details all over the net but what I found neat was the list. It is assumed that the average adult has read only 6 of the top 100 books. I fared pretty good - fully 1/4th of the list I've read. How about you?

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE. (I didn't do this, it's such a strong word!)

** 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Natalie, you hooked me! Without you I wouldn’t have picked it up!)
% 2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
% 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
% 4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (I’ve read one or two)
** 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
*% 6 The Bible (Still working on it!)
% 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
* 8 1984 - George Orwell (Thanks to 9th Grade English)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
% 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
** 11 Little Women - Louisa May 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 - J.R.R. Tolkien (well I have started it )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
% 18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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 (My grandmother had “Through the Looking Glass” which was a bizarre sequel which I read)
** 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
% 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
** 33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis (FAVORITE as a kid!)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
** 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis – (FAVORITE as a kid!)
** 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières -
** 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
** 40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
* 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (Again, thanks to high school English)
* 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 - L.M. 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 (I need to read this since I loved Ahab’s Wife and should read it for reference for AW, probably would have gotten more from it)
* 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
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
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
** 87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
** 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (If you haven’t read this, DO!)
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 - in French
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
** 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (Made me cry!!!!!)
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

1 comment:

The Gasser Family said...

Well, I seriously have to go through this list....I would love to see how man I actually have read--thankfully I know every title on here...(just about) and I THINK i have read a good amount of that list...I should print it and see....I am sooo slacking in reading these days so much to read and so little time!