Monday, 21 July 2008

To read, or not to read

I came across this post on someone else's blog and, being a book lover, was intrigued to see how it applied to me ...

In April 2003, the BBC compiled The Big Read, which began as a search for the UK's best loved novel. Apparently the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. (OK, I couldn't find a reliable source here; I just pilfered this fact from lots of other blogs which have copied and pasted this list/activity.)

Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.
  1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
  2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien {no intention whatsoever!}
  3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
  4. [Harry Potter series] - JK Rowling
  5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
  6. The Bible {a fair bit of it}
  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
  13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
  14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - William Shakespeare {a few plays}
  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien {tried several times, hated it, won't try again}
  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
  18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
  19. The Time Traveler'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 {tried, not really my thing}
  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 Bernières
  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 Misérables - Victor Hugo
So, going by my results, I can now say that I'm not an average adult:
  • I have read 26 of these books
  • Of these 26, I [love 11] of them
  • I want to read 16 more of them
In New Zealand, Whitcoulls publish a Top 100 list which is updated annually. I think I'm about a third of the way through this list, too.

How did you go? Are you an average adult?

1 comment:

Sab said...

Glancing over your list, I can say I've for sure read 12 of those books... and I love 4 or 5.