9.22.2008

A Rather Mental Meme Monday

The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you'll go.
~ Dr. Seuss

Today’s Meme Monday offering is right up my alley -- and it’s pilfered from one of my favorite people, the lovely perpstu, who pilfered it from another of my favorite people, Megan at Po(sey) Sessions.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list. I may be average in a lot of areas (let's not go into that now, 'kay), but reading is not one of them. So let's see how this list plays out Jane-style.

The instructions:
Look at the list and...
* ...bold those you have read. (because the font I use on the blog isn't very "bold", I both bolded and italicized those which I have read, for clarity's sake)
* ...italicize those you intend to read
* ...underline the books you LOVE.
* ...encourage people to reprint this list on their own blogs.

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 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 - 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 (just because)
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’ 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

OK. It looks like I've read about half of these. Not bad. Some, I'm surprised to say, I'm totally not familiar with. Which is good, as I now have some reading research to do. And I was tempted to create my own addtion to the legend: strike-through any book you have no intention of ever reading. But I opted not to go there. I'll let you guess which books fall on that list of mine.

A postscript from the English Major: Any list of "top" books that doesn't include Hemingway, Faulkner or Twain, but does include Helen Fielding, Mitch Albom and Donna Tartt is a little, shall we say, unusual (trying to be tactful here) in my book. No pun intended. And I loved Bridget Jones and The Secret History. Seriously.

Now it's y'all's turn... let me know what your list looks like. I'm nosy like that...

4 comments:

TopSurf said...

I love this list and have seen it on both of the above mentioned blogs but today I printed it out. I guess I just needed that extra push, I need to get my reading glasses on and get back at it. I hate when I don't have time to read.

Anonymous said...

You haven't read Lord of the Rigns or Harry Potter? No Les Miserables? You are obviously in need of another trip to Las Vegas so you can lounge in a cabana by the pool and catch up on your reading.

I'll meet you there!

XOXO

Unknown said...

CJ, I am about to put this list up on my blog too. I was shocked at how few of these books I have read. I have read tons of books in my days but I guess not the top 100. I'm a rebel, what can I say?

Anonymous said...

I borrowed this one from perpstu too and am very impressed you've read half of them. I agree the list is unusual and was surprised to have read less than 30 of them.