Sunday, March 20, 2011

Books!

As I’ve mentioned before, I love to read archives because I like to get to know someone before adding them to my feed reader.  This list has shown up in the archives of most of the blogs I’ve read and it’s never interested me that much, but today I suddenly found it fascinating. I especially like it when people put in a lot of comments about the books they’ve read on the list.


If you’ve done this before, please link to your post (from forever ago, I’m sure) in the comments.


Supposedly, the average American has only read six of the following hundred:

Key
1) Bold the books you have already read
2) Italicize the books you intend to read


1) Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (I'm currently reading this.  As soon as I finish it, I’ll be sure to watch the Colin Firth movie/miniseries/whatever it is. I'm sure you're shocked I’ve never seen it.)

2) The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (My husband loves the movies and I hate them. I saw the first two in theaters and spent the whole time counting the minutes until they’d be over.  If you love the books/movies, can we still be friends?)

3) Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

4) Harry Potter series by J. K. Rowling (love! I don’t know how many times I’ve read them, but it’s a lot!)

5) To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (HATED. I thought this book was terrible, and so was the old movie. But I was forced to read it my freshman year of high school and then watched the movie in class, so perhaps I wouldn’t hate it so much now? If you love it, feel free to try to talk me into re-reading.)

6) The Bible (I’ve even read Leviticus – that’s the long rules-filled one, right?)

7) Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

8) Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell

9) His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman

10) Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

11) Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (My mom gave me her old copy when I was 8? 10? and I love it so much.)

12) Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

13) Catch 22 by Joseph Heller

14) Complete Works of Shakespeare (Complete works? Seriously? That’s a lot.)

15) Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier (Gorgeous book)

16) The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien (BORING. This book is the reason I didn’t read the LOTR trilogy, which may be the reason I didn’t like the movies.  But I was pretty young - middle school, maybe? -, so maybe I should try again?)

17) Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

18) Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger (Horrible, horrible book. It was assigned for some English class I took in high school. If I remember correctly there is nothing in this book except sex and swearing. At least it’s really short.)

19) The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (I liked the movie.)

20) Middlemarch by George Eliot

21) Gone With The Wind by Margaret Mitchell (I’ve always intended to read this.)

22) The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

23) Bleak House by Charles Dickens

24) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (This would probably take me a YEAR to read.)

25) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

26) Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh

27) Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Ditto to War and Peace. Or am I getting them confused and only one of them is insanely long?)

28) Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (High school English.  We also had to do an art project based on the book - how lame is that?)

29) Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (Did you ever see some made-for-TV movie or miniseries called Alice in Wonderland that had a long part (or what seemed long) about the Jabberwocky in it? It scared the CRAP out of me and my sisters.) (Not to be confused with the Disney Channel series that was pure fluff.)

30) The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame (I love this book, mainly because there was some TV show or miniseries or something based on it that was wonderful. (We didn’t have cable growing up, so we saw a lot of PBS-type stuff))

31) Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (WONDERFUL book, but takes a while to get into. I don’t think I would have stuck with it if it wasn’t assigned reading and I’m SO GLAD I had to.)

32) David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

33) Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis

34) Emma by Jane Austen

35) Persuasion by Jane Austen

36) The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe by CS Lewis (I really should read the rest of the Chronicles of Narnia, I know)

37) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

38) Captain Corelli's Mandolin by Louis De Bernieres

39) Memories of a Geisha by Arthur Golden

40) Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne

41) Animal Farm by George Orwell

42) The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown

43) One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44) A Prayer for Owen Meaney by John Irving

45) The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins

46) Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (What teenage girl didn’t read these books? I own the whole series.)

47) Far From The Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy

48) The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood (I just read this last week and I'm still processing.  I'm not sure how I feel about it.)

49) Lord of the Flies by William Golding

50) Atonement by Ian McEwan

51) Life of Pi by Yann Martel

52) Dune by Frank Herbert

53) Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

54) Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (Yes, I haven’t read a single Jane Austen book. I'm working on it.)

55) A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (Vikram!  This just makes me think of Friends)

56) The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57) A Tale Of Two Cities by Charles Dickens

58) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

59) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

60) Love In The Time Of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61) Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck

62) Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

63) The Secret History by Donna Tartt

64) The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (I read half of the first chapter and instantly tried to wipe it from my mind. I can’t read about things like this, I just can’t. I KNEW it would give me terrible nightmares and I just couldn’t go on.)

65) Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas

66) On The Road by Jack Kerouac

67) Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy

68) Bridget Jones's Diary by Helen Fielding

69) Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

70) Moby Dick by Herman Melville

71) Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens

72) Dracula by Bram Stoker

73) The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett (Also a book my mom gave me her old copy of. I loved it.)

74) Notes From A Small Island by Bill Bryson (I’ve read a few Bill Bryson books, but so long ago I can’t remember which ones. I remember I liked them!)

75) Ulysses by James Joyce

76) The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

77) Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome

78) Germinal by Emile Zola

79) Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray

80) Possession by AS Byatt

81) A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (I don’t think I’ve ever read the book, but I’m fairly certain I read parts of it in an English class. It could have been the whole thing, I don’t really remember.)

82) Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

83) The Color Purple by Alice Walker

84) The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

85) Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

86) A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

87) Charlotte's Web by EB White

88) The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom (At least Eat Pray Love isn’t on the list. I have no reason to group those books together, other than I think of them both as “fad” books. I haven’t read either of them. Still, I intend to read them to see what the fuss is about.)

89) Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Snoozefest. Could barely get through it, but I finished the whole thing because I thought it must get more interesting. It didn’t.)

90) The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton

91) Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

92) The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93) The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks

94) Watership Down by Richard Adams (This is about animals, right? Similar to the Redwall books? I loved those books.)

95) A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole

96) A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute

97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

98) Hamlet by William Shakespeare (I've read parts of it.)

99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (I believe I read every book ever written by Roald Dahl when I was in the 4th grade. I do think this one is the best, but James and the Giant Peach is great, too.)

100) Les Miserables by Victor Hugo (I own this book and I’ve seen the broadway show twice (not actually ON Broadway, though – the traveling show))

1 comment:

  1. I did this, but can't find it. Huh. But I was way over the "average" which isn't surprising since I inhale books. But What I thought was surprising was that I hadn't read MORE of them, but I guess I'm not as into the classics as I would have thought. :)

    ReplyDelete