I saw this on Suture For a Living and thought it was a wonderful meme that's going around. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has a program called "The Big Read". The Big Read is an initiative of the NEA designed to restore reading to the center of American culture. The NEA presents The Big Read in partnership with the Institute of Museum and Library Services and in cooperation with Arts Midwest. This meme isn't part of that, or at least I don't think so, but it is interesting to read the "meme list" and see which ones you have read. I admit that some of them I've never heard of and that there are several I think should have made the list and didn't.
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.” Where do you fall on this list?
1) Bold: I have read.2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read only 6 and force books upon them!!
4) I'm adding this one! What books do you think are missing from this list?
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
7 . Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Phillip 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 . The Complete works of Shakespeare (Like Purplesque I've tried, and failed. Have seen many of them performed.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit --J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife
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
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 (I didn't understand this one!
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 (we studied this to boredom in sophomore English)
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 (I confess to not finishing this one all the way to the end)
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
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 St. Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (one of my favorite books ever)
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
15 comments:
I read all the time but I don't know how many I can claim from your list. When it is not so late and I have more time I will do your meme.
Have a good day.
I see that you met our English chef Marie. Isn't she a sweetheart!
I have read a bunch of these! There are many more that I think should be included, I will blog about this sometime this week! Thanks for a fun blog! Much love - Raquel XO
I'm afraid I haven't read many of these. Maybe 3 or 4. I like to read but tend to read christian fiction like Karen Kingsbury, or maybe Nicholas Sparks, Debbie Macomber, Jan Karon, etc. I probably "had" to read some of these in HS english but I sure can't remember which ones. Maybe because I didn't really read them?
Great post, Marlene. I'm going to do this on my blog, too. I love to read~though haven't read as many of the classics as I should. I'm working on it!
R~Mary
I've read a few of these books, but not most of them. I have read others, that I love, though. Alot of Abraham Lincoln ones...and I'm reading the Diary of Anne Frank right now. :)
This list is so interesting. Thanks for sharing it! I see several on there that I've been meaning to read this summer, but hadn't gotten around to it. There's still time for maybe one. Thanks for the reminder!
Great list. I have read 20 of them and see more that I should read, and many that I have never heard of. No Pearl Buck on the list this time?
I am ashamed to say that I would be embarrassed to say what I have read. I am just not a reader, but I want to be. My mom reads everything. I will try to do better though. I might start with this list. Thanks for sharing.
I have to admit I haven't read most of these...
I am more of a biography/history reader. I didn't grow up with much literary training being from another country, and thus haven't learned to acquire the level of appreciation I should have to great literature. *Head hanging in shame*
Hi Marlene
I've read 22 of them. I wonder who are the powers that be that decided this was the list to measure reading with? Anyhow it was good to see that I'm not illiterate according to "them"
Hugs, Rhondi
Great list, and I've read many of them, but hey! (Where are any quilt books? and computer books! )LOL
I've read 19! Not bad since they say the average is 6. But then, I'm getting old and have had more time!
I've only read 14 of these, but I'm saving this list for the future :)
I love this! I have read a lot of them but not enough! I just started Persuasion night before last, it's my first Jane Austen! So far I prefer the Bronte girls but we'll see :) If I remember I'm going to put this on my blog..."remember" is the key word here lol!
Thanks for writing this.
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