Sunday, June 29, 2008

Top 100 Books Meme

I found this meme on My Bit About Me by Rachel and I thought it might be fun to do. Please consider yourself "tagged" if you want to do it too!

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

Instructions:
A) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
B) Italicize those you intend to read.
C) Underline the books you LOVE
D) Colour pink if you've seen the movie (you can also bold if you've read the book as well).
E) Colour green if you began reading it but couldn't finish it. If you need to colour pink and green - good luck!

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 I enjoyed some of the early ones but got bogged down later. I quite liked the one film I saw, except that it made me want a broomstick. I wonder if they'll bring out jet-powered ones some day.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible All of it. Sorry but it's true. I have an excuse but you probably won't want to hear it. Come to think of it, it's not a very good excuse.
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 - I may have read this at school but I'm not sure.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare I read a lot of these for my degree but I haven't read the whole lot!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - I think I may have read this a long time ago but I can't remember.
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 Read for a course.
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 Can't remember if I finished it or not.
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen I know I've read Northanger Abbey, which I loved. I'm pretty sure I read one other but I don't know if it was this one or not
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - a bit of double counting here, I notice.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden I say I'm going to read these three but whether I ever will is anyone's guess.
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
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (but I heard it on the radio)
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
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
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 - I hadn't even heard of this one.
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro I think that "Never Let Me Go" should be in the list, too.
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 I couldn't get enough of these when I was a kid.
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery in French and in English
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - but I have read "The Crow Road" and loved it.
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

I've read around 35 of them, allowing for faulty memory in both directions. This is a lot fewer than most of the other blogs I checked out as I followed this meme back to its source. I notice I mainly liked anything sci fi, anything for kids, and anything crappy but popular (e.g. The Da Vinci Code). Hey ho, we can't all be the brightest spark in the toolbox.

4 COMMENTS:

Robin S. said...

Wow. Great list!

I'd scanned through this -I have about the same number read as you did - but most were different - AAtonement and Lolita and Of Mice and Men come to mind that I read. I didn't read Lord of the Rings. Did read all of HP, as you did.

Damn. I thought I could remember more of your coloring and bolds than that. Now if I switch away from the page- I'll lose what I'm writing.

fairyhedgehog said...

It's a pain that you can't see the original formatting when you're commenting. I suppose you could always open the original post again in another window.

I'm interested in how different your list is - and how similar.

Anonymous said...

This is fascinating, but WHOSE list is it? You and I have some overlap but also a lot of differences, and there is a multitude of books that should be on anyone's 100 List that aren't here. Of course, that's what 100 Lists are about in the first place.

I think I'll do something on my site about people ten most vividly remembered books -- what they were, when they read them, what they got out of them, why they liked and/or hated them.

Or maybe not.

fairyhedgehog said...

The Big Read is produced by the BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/ and I'm guessing that the list is made up from any listeners who bothered to vote.

I like the idea of the top ten most vividly remembered books. You could be starting a new meme there.

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