The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.
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) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only six and force books upon them.
If the average adult has only read 6 of these books, I've read 42 (and a couple of those are series or collections, so that ups the number a bit) and I read nearly all of them before high school, and all of them definately before I was 18, I have to ask what's up with the public educational system? Because most of these I read IN SCHOOL. Except the ones I underlined - those I read on my own. Coincidence?
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) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read only six and force books upon them.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien A lot of folks have read this, but not read The Silmarillion. Folks, without The Silmarillion, you're missing a lot of context.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - several times. I'm with![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
taciton this one, I don't see how anyone can actually READ this and remain a christian?
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Read it for class, don't remember a thing about it.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - another class book I don't remember well
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - another class book I don't remember well
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I can't stand Shakespeare. I read him several times. Between being a theatre major and in accelerated english (including an entire semester devoted just to the "great" poets), I couldn't escape!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Not as good as LoTR.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - a class book I absolutely couldn't stand
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 - another class book I don't remember well
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - the brilliance of this cannot be understated
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - (had to leavetacit's comments here) It gets even better when you realize that Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician with a thing for his friend's daughter Alice Liddell and a penchant for burying hidden messages acrostically in the poetry in his books. It's hard for modern readers to fully appreciate Jabberwocky, because many of the nonsense words he made up have become real English words. How cool is that?
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - another class book I don't remember well
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - even as a child I could feel the heavy-handed christianity (I was raised catholic but gave it up somewhere around 3rd grade), but I always loved the idea of magically transporting myself to another world where I could become ruler.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe - C S Lewis - See above.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - too bad the movie wasn't as good
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - I liked the cartoon better.
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 - liked the original, progressively disliked all the following in the series
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - another class book I don't remember well
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - another class book I don't remember well
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 - holy crap! A book on this list I actually want to read but haven't yet!
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 - another class book I don't remember well, but it's so steeped in our culture that I at least remember the basic plot
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - was even in the play
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - went through a classical vampire literature phase (no, this did not include Ann Rice!) where I loved it. Now, not so much
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Again with the secret fantasy world that I could retreat to ... it's an Introvert thing, I guess
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - another class book I don't remember well
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 - You mean there's someone somewhere who hasn't read this? It's impossible to escape!
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 - even did my college english thesis paper on it.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - there's a space in my heart for any story that emphasizes logic and critical thinking to save the day and where such skills always win.
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 - another class book I don't remember well
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - another class book I don't remember well
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Since the complete works of Shakespeare is already on the list, and Hamlet is contained within the complete works, one has to assume that someone is padding the list here...
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - I'm a huge fan of anyone who writes children's books with all the horror and grotesqueness of Roald Dahl and manages to squeak past the censors!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien A lot of folks have read this, but not read The Silmarillion. Folks, without The Silmarillion, you're missing a lot of context.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - several times. I'm with
taciton this one, I don't see how anyone can actually READ this and remain a christian?7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens Read it for class, don't remember a thing about it.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - another class book I don't remember well
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - another class book I don't remember well
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - I can't stand Shakespeare. I read him several times. Between being a theatre major and in accelerated english (including an entire semester devoted just to the "great" poets), I couldn't escape!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Not as good as LoTR.
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - a class book I absolutely couldn't stand
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 - another class book I don't remember well
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - the brilliance of this cannot be understated
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - (had to leave
tacit's comments here) It gets even better when you realize that Carroll (Charles Dodgson) was a mathematician with a thing for his friend's daughter Alice Liddell and a penchant for burying hidden messages acrostically in the poetry in his books. It's hard for modern readers to fully appreciate Jabberwocky, because many of the nonsense words he made up have become real English words. How cool is that?30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - another class book I don't remember well
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - even as a child I could feel the heavy-handed christianity (I was raised catholic but gave it up somewhere around 3rd grade), but I always loved the idea of magically transporting myself to another world where I could become ruler.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe - C S Lewis - See above.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - too bad the movie wasn't as good
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - I liked the cartoon better.
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 - liked the original, progressively disliked all the following in the series
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - another class book I don't remember well
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - another class book I don't remember well
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 - holy crap! A book on this list I actually want to read but haven't yet!
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 - another class book I don't remember well, but it's so steeped in our culture that I at least remember the basic plot
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - was even in the play
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - went through a classical vampire literature phase (no, this did not include Ann Rice!) where I loved it. Now, not so much
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Again with the secret fantasy world that I could retreat to ... it's an Introvert thing, I guess
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - another class book I don't remember well
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 - You mean there's someone somewhere who hasn't read this? It's impossible to escape!
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 - even did my college english thesis paper on it.
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - there's a space in my heart for any story that emphasizes logic and critical thinking to save the day and where such skills always win.
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 - another class book I don't remember well
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - another class book I don't remember well
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Since the complete works of Shakespeare is already on the list, and Hamlet is contained within the complete works, one has to assume that someone is padding the list here...
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - I'm a huge fan of anyone who writes children's books with all the horror and grotesqueness of Roald Dahl and manages to squeak past the censors!
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
If the average adult has only read 6 of these books, I've read 42 (and a couple of those are series or collections, so that ups the number a bit) and I read nearly all of them before high school, and all of them definately before I was 18, I have to ask what's up with the public educational system? Because most of these I read IN SCHOOL. Except the ones I underlined - those I read on my own. Coincidence?
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Date: 6/30/08 08:03 pm (UTC)From: