Gacked from venivincere – big read meme

[lexin]

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

1.) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2.) Italicize those you intend to read.
3.) Underline those you LOVE.
4.) Put an asterisk next to the books you'd rather shove hot pokers in your eyes than read.

I reckon that my friends list isn't composed of 'average' adults. For one thing, from the school of 'I read it somewhere' studies, I read somewhere that the average home has about six books – and those design programmes on the TV seem to bear that out. I've rarely seen a shelf on "Cowboy Builders", let alone a book. I have about 2500 books, which would pose a big problem for any designer.


01. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
05. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06. The Bible
07. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
08. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
*12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (See below for my views on Hardy.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (The Hobbit is my #1 'I don't feel very well and want to read something undemanding but loads of fun' book. I must have read it 70 or 80 times, to the point where I can recite bits of it.)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
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 (I enjoyed reading it, but when I grew up and realised some of the meaning behind it, I really resented feeling that I was being manipulated.)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
*39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I tried. I failed.)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Never again. "This is not a book to be put away lightly, it should the thrown…")
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(I never want to read this book again. I hate Hardy and all his works.)
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Like Hardy, I never want to read this again. Or any of his other works.)
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 (I enjoyed it, but won't read it again.)
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. The 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 (I read it because I thought I should. Boy was that a bad decision. Crap book. That Joyce is good is a joke played on the reading public.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (Supposed to be a good book, but I can't remember much about it.)
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 (As venivincere said, "Please God, never again.")
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
*93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (I tried, I failed.)
*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

Comments

[sollers]

Definitely not average. There are fewer than twenty books on that list that I have not read or at least attempted to read (I'm with you on Hardy and also "The Wasp Factory"). And I would say that, for practical purposes, to get far enough into a book to decide that it is emphatically not my scene counts as reading it.

[lexin]

Actually in that case some of the ones I've marked with an asterisk, count as having been read, including "The Colour Purple", "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Jude the Obscure", all of which I tried and failed to read.

Hardy! Ptui! I have a version of one of Hardy's books (I forget which, offhand) as a talking book read by Alan Rickman, and even the fact that it's read by Alan Rickman is not enough to make me listen to it again.

[marahmarie]

Hear, hear, seconding that. I've read, at a glance, maybe 50-70% of the books on this list. I don't read sci-fi so Harry Potter books are out, not into CS Lewis, can't get through Hitchhiker's Guide to save my life but have tried, and outside of those, there's maybe 20-30 books on this list I haven't read (and looking at the titles, probably don't want to). If it's an older classic I've likely read it, with Anna Karenina being one of my favorites.

[coughingbear]

I have read 89 of them, allowing myself the Bible & the Collected Works of Shakespeare, both of which I've read a lot of, but not all.

(Am also puzzled by the Hamlet & LWW problem - wonder where the list came from, as it's almost but not quite the same as the one here.)

[lexin]

That's one of the things about a meme - it changes subtly over time. I suspect that's where the differences have crept in. But I could be wrong.

Eighty-nine is a lot!

[pickledginger]

Eighteen I don't think I've read, though there may be one or two of those I would start and then recognize. I have read enough Hardy -- and a few books more after that, trying to figure out what some friends find so appealing. I agree with you completely on Joyce -- appallingly bad and pretentious both, especially Ulysses, though that is not quite so bad as The Cantos of Ezra Pound. (I read both, with the Odyssey and Illiad and more -- all in English except the Pound -- for a college course, once upon a time.)

[lexin]

It astonishes me constantly that people make a living as a 'Joyce scholar', when what I think should happen to those books is that they should be dropped into a pit, covered with badger manure and then napalmed.

The same for Golding, and he won prizes.

[dorothy1901]

Odd list. There's no Book 19? And I see "14. Complete Works of Shakespeare" and "98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare".

I've read 48 of the books listed, plus pieces of many others. Some of the books I don't even recognize.

Lots of Thomas Hardy in the list, no Somerset Maugham. I think Maugham would be amused by that.

[lexin]

I never noticed the lack of a 19. I wonder if googling the list would help in finding out what it was before the fact that it was meme'd excised it.

I've never read any Maugham, so didn't notice the lack.

No SF to speak of, though, either.

[dorothy1901]

There's no Kipling, either. No Mark Twain. No Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Virginia Woolf, Anthony Trollope, P.G. Wodehouse, Edith Wharton. Yet Hardy is listed three times, Dumas twice, Dickens six times, Austen four times, Tolkien twice.

No SF. No plays or poetry except Shakespeare (I think; there are titles and names I don't recognize). I'm curious as to who put this list together, and what criteria they used.

[pickledginger]

Yes, what is with all the Hardy?

Also, at 33 and 36, I believe it is, we have the full Chronicles of Narnia ... then one book thereof.

[stranger]

Listing a "complete works" (as opposed to series of books related to each other, like Narnia) seems very much like cheating, in the composition of lists like this. It also leads to the problem of lumping an author's works together, and then listing at least one of them separately.

If the list is based on how many copies a book has sold, maybe both a Complete Shakespeare volume and Hamlet as a separate volume both sell really well. In which case, how much of sales is driven by standard-canon works being assigned in school (or just pushed by the weight of "culture") and read by people who wouldn't otherwise buy or read them, or not at that time?

[lexin]

I don't know how the list was put together. Thrown together it looks like.

[hunningham]

It's a very strange list; it looks as if someone stopped many members of the British public (probably when they were queuing up in Tesco, or loading cat litter into a shopping trolley, or just generally distracted) and asked them to name a "Great Book". I'm just surprised that Noddy didn't make an appearance.

[lexin]

It does rather look like that, doesn't it?

[manna]

That's actually pretty much exactly what they did.

Looking at the top 200 list, I notice that 'The Very Hungry Caterpillar' and 'Flowers in the Attic' were 199 and 200. I'm rather charmed that those are about equally loved by the British public.

[antisoppist]

I had a similar reaction to having been cruelly tricked by the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. I didn't notice until the TV dramatisation (by which time I was in my teens) and my mother's reaction to my outraged "but... but... Aslan is like Jesus!" was the parently equivalent of "well, duh!". To be fair, it isn't really Lewis' fault that I didn't work this out years earlier.

[marahmarie]

I read somewhere that the average home has about six books

And you have over 2500. But with all due respect, why does this matter? I thought that was what libraries were for. I've owned literally hundreds of books (and probably read hundreds more), and donated nearly every one of them once I got past the point where I thought I'd want to read them again. Books take up space, attract dust and cause air pollution, age badly, and can be expensive. I don't think how many books a person owns should be the metric anyone uses to decide how well-read a person is. The rich especially have entire rooms filled with books...just for show. Some of the rooms I've seen, no living person could read all the books within them in one lifetime.