Big Read's top 100

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 21:34:25 GMT

Stolen from a LJ not worth reading. (Irony is fun.)

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4~~) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.~~
5) Books I’ve tried to read, at some point, are labeled with an asterisk. It takes a bit to get me to abandon a book, but it happens.

Anything unmarked I either haven’t heard much about, or feel indifferently towards.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I haven’t read all of it yet. Or, there are some bits I’m pretty sure I’ve read and just don’t remember. Covering all bases here :D)
~~7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte~~
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I have read Zamyatin’s We, which is what inspired 1984. If we’re giving out E’s for Effort.)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Eight Cousins was better.)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (This is kind of a lie… there are some of his plays I plan on avoiding. But I’ll read most of them. Eventually.)
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~~ (Avoiding this one like the plague. Although I will be seeing the movie, hooray for Eric Bana!)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I enjoyed Mill on the Floss, I’ve heard this is better.)
~~21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell~~ (Never, never and never.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I should… but I’m afeared.)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
~~27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky~~ (Demons has ruined me forever.)
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

Honestly, this sounds like an ego-stroking, “rah rah rah, aren’t we so smart” sort of meme, but since reading is sort of my life, I thought I’d give it a go. Of course, I’ve only read about a quarter, so maybe I’ve epic failed college and life :P

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Big Read's top 100