adrian_turtle (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
adrian_turtle) wrote2008-06-30 08:19 am
adrian_turtle) wrote2008-06-30 08:19 am
book meme
I borrowed this peculiar list from Phoenix14159. It seems to be some kind of overview of "What does it mean to be a best-selling novel in different times and places?" I've seen others post the list in terms of "the average person has only read 6 of these, how many have you read?" That seems odd to me, because so many of the books were part of my school curriculum.
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.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen read in the last few years, thanks to LJ
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Read the summer I turned 18, and again in the last few years. I care about it more for community reasons than literary ones.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte read for school
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling read for community reasons, not quite the same as for Tolkien
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee read for school as a teenager, reread last year. Wow.
6. The Bible Depending on one's definition, I've read all of it, about 80%, or about 10%. I read bits of the King James Version (which is what people usually seem to mean when they talk about it as literature) for a high school class.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte I read this for a university course. Meh.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell I read this for school as a teenager
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman I read the whole trilogy, but only loved the first 2 books.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens read for school.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott An aunt gave me this when I was 7 or 8, and nowhere near ready for it. Enough of my friends loved it that I tried again several times. I no longer think it's *deadly* dull, but it's not a favorite.
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy I saw the movie, and tried to read the book in hope it would make sense of the movie, but bounced off the book.
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller Read for school. I think I was 16.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare I read half a dozen plays for class at secondary school and another half dozen at university. I've seen others, and read some just because they were nearby. (Henry VI, part I was a terrible letdown.) I never read it straight through, but I think I've studied more than half at one time or another, and counting performances would bring the total over 80%. Considering that I claim to have "seen a movie" when I had my eyes closed for all the action scenes, I claim to have "read" this book. With footnotes.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (one chapter was enough)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger Read for school when I was 15. Did not like it at all.
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 Read for school when I was 15. Liked it a little.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens Believe it or not, I read this based on an implicit recommendation in a Noel Streetfeld novel. I didn't think it was all that.
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 read for school when I was 16
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll read for school when I was 9 or so.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame People tried to read me this one as a child, and I loathed it. I regard it more favorably now.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis I loved this when I read it at 7-8. I see its flaws now, but I'm still quite fond of it.
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis see also 33. Somebody put the list together without sufficient attention to detail.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres This is a very tentative maybe. I keep seeing it in the library and thinking, "Maybe someday, but not this week."
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell I also read this for school. I think I was 12. It totally blew me away.
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 This was in the box with _Little Women_. I didn't like it much better.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood I read it when I was an undergraduate, when many of the people I knew were talking about it. I liked it, but didn't love it.
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding read for school, age 10 or 11.
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert Read at 17. Thought it was ok.
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth This is one I very much WANT to read, and have tried several times. It's just too big for me (in the sense of not being able to lift it.) When I can get a copy as an ebook, or as a competent audiobook, it's going on my short list, based on Seth's _An Equal Music_.
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Read for school at 14.
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' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker Read for a university course. Eh.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett Read when I was in elementary school.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce This one I did NOT read for school, but on a dare when I was 14.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (I tried. I really, really, tried.)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens I almost didn't need to read this one, having heard it performed so many times. But I once read it for a class.
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker I know lots of people who read this for school, but I think they're all younger than me.
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 I loved Albom's columns about sports, but this did not work for me.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I've read it more than once, but I don't love it.
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 It's not Shute's best work. I've grown to recognize it as advocating a moral and political philosophy I consider wrong. I still love it.
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare see also #14.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The list came from The Big Read at the BBC, as part of a search for "the nation's best-loved novel." http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
The list they have up now is slightly different from the one being passed around LJ, presumably because the top 100 shifted as people added votes for books they loved. It makes a lot of sense to me that people of different tastes are going to love different books. It's easy and not a bit blameworthy for one to not read books another loves. Though it still strikes me as odd that so many of the books on the list are books I had to read for school.
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.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen read in the last few years, thanks to LJ
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Read the summer I turned 18, and again in the last few years. I care about it more for community reasons than literary ones.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte read for school
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling read for community reasons, not quite the same as for Tolkien
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee read for school as a teenager, reread last year. Wow.
6. The Bible Depending on one's definition, I've read all of it, about 80%, or about 10%. I read bits of the King James Version (which is what people usually seem to mean when they talk about it as literature) for a high school class.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte I read this for a university course. Meh.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell I read this for school as a teenager
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman I read the whole trilogy, but only loved the first 2 books.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens read for school.
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott An aunt gave me this when I was 7 or 8, and nowhere near ready for it. Enough of my friends loved it that I tried again several times. I no longer think it's *deadly* dull, but it's not a favorite.
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy I saw the movie, and tried to read the book in hope it would make sense of the movie, but bounced off the book.
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller Read for school. I think I was 16.
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare I read half a dozen plays for class at secondary school and another half dozen at university. I've seen others, and read some just because they were nearby. (Henry VI, part I was a terrible letdown.) I never read it straight through, but I think I've studied more than half at one time or another, and counting performances would bring the total over 80%. Considering that I claim to have "seen a movie" when I had my eyes closed for all the action scenes, I claim to have "read" this book. With footnotes.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (one chapter was enough)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger Read for school when I was 15. Did not like it at all.
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 Read for school when I was 15. Liked it a little.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens Believe it or not, I read this based on an implicit recommendation in a Noel Streetfeld novel. I didn't think it was all that.
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 read for school when I was 16
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll read for school when I was 9 or so.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame People tried to read me this one as a child, and I loathed it. I regard it more favorably now.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis I loved this when I read it at 7-8. I see its flaws now, but I'm still quite fond of it.
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis see also 33. Somebody put the list together without sufficient attention to detail.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres This is a very tentative maybe. I keep seeing it in the library and thinking, "Maybe someday, but not this week."
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell I also read this for school. I think I was 12. It totally blew me away.
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 This was in the box with _Little Women_. I didn't like it much better.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood I read it when I was an undergraduate, when many of the people I knew were talking about it. I liked it, but didn't love it.
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding read for school, age 10 or 11.
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert Read at 17. Thought it was ok.
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth This is one I very much WANT to read, and have tried several times. It's just too big for me (in the sense of not being able to lift it.) When I can get a copy as an ebook, or as a competent audiobook, it's going on my short list, based on Seth's _An Equal Music_.
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens Read for school at 14.
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' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker Read for a university course. Eh.
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett Read when I was in elementary school.
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce This one I did NOT read for school, but on a dare when I was 14.
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (I tried. I really, really, tried.)
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens I almost didn't need to read this one, having heard it performed so many times. But I once read it for a class.
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker I know lots of people who read this for school, but I think they're all younger than me.
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 I loved Albom's columns about sports, but this did not work for me.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I've read it more than once, but I don't love it.
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 It's not Shute's best work. I've grown to recognize it as advocating a moral and political philosophy I consider wrong. I still love it.
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare see also #14.
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
The list came from The Big Read at the BBC, as part of a search for "the nation's best-loved novel." http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml
The list they have up now is slightly different from the one being passed around LJ, presumably because the top 100 shifted as people added votes for books they loved. It makes a lot of sense to me that people of different tastes are going to love different books. It's easy and not a bit blameworthy for one to not read books another loves. Though it still strikes me as odd that so many of the books on the list are books I had to read for school.