Tuesday, July 1, 2008

OK, I'll bite

Emilie and a bunch of other women posted this on their blogs, and I can't resist. Besides, it's a reader-grabber. It's the NEA's "Big Read" list; they guess the average adult has read six of these illustrious titles. How sad is that?

We're instructed to: "1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read. 2) Italicize those you intend to read. 3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them."

  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 (but, of course, I'll never finish it)

  7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

  8. 1984 - 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

  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 (twice!)

  22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (once in high school, once in college, twice in grad school ... let me tell you about all the incidents of golden imagery in this book ... oh, my. This is the perfect American novel.)

  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

  44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 (several times)

  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

  91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

  92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (en francais!)

  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

3 comments:

Emilie said...

I love reading what other people have read - so thanks for posting this!

I saw "The Bell Jar" is one of your favorites. For me, reading that book was scary (and I read it twice); it got me too much inside the head of an insane person, to the point that I started to feel trapped under a bell jar myself. That was hard to shake off.

Madwoman of Preserve Path said...

That's why this book was so thrilling to read. I was kind of obsessed with it -- it felt almost voyeuristic to get inside someone's head that way, didn't it? But what I learned from that book is that the line between creative genius and madness can be very blurry. I wish Sylvia had lived to tell us about it from a healthy place.

Unknown said...

OK I've read 29 of those. Not great! Yeesh. I've started at least five more, but became distracted or something. It's a wonderful list -- I should keep it in my wallet for when I'm at the library, looking for something.