can't resist a good book meme

[auntiemeesh]

Snurched from stargazercmc

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish.

Note: I can't actually find this particular list anywhere at the BBC, so I don't know if it's true that they think we'll have only read an average of six of these titles, but hey, why not just go with it.

Note 2: It's interesting to look at this list. Between the books that we're made to read for school lit classes and the ones that are pretty standard classic children's lit, I would expect most people who read at all would have read far more than six. And the people who don't care to read wouldn't be interested in book lists like this, so I have to wonder what the point of making a list like this and then saying most people won't have read these books is. Is it to make all of us feel superior for having read more than six? Is it to make the non-readers feel bad for not reading? Seems a little lame, either way. It makes for a fun book meme, anyhow.




1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. 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 - Philip Pullman (I read the first two books in their entirety but didn't read the third.)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (this was a school reading, and I think we read just an excerpt from it.)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I started this one in NH but moved before I got very far - I'll get a copy and finish it someday)
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 (I know I read bits of it, but I don't remember if I ever read the whole thing when I was a kid.)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34Emma - 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 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
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
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 - 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
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

And while I'm on the subject of books, I read How Evan Broke His Head and Other Secrets today. It was one of those books I couldn't put down, which hasn't happened in a while, for me. I've become a reader of fanfic, sitting in front of my computer, rather than browsing the stores and library for 'real' books. So I'm going to review this in terms of fanfic, because I'm just that lame. I would classify this as angsty h/c with a side of whump, mostly gen with a bit of light het, R rating for language and nudity. Written in a tight third person pov on the main character. Basically, just exactly the right sort of story elements to make me instantly fall in love. And I kinda did. Evan is thirty-one when he falls into fatherhood for his fourteen year old son, whom he last saw the day the kid was born. He's a guitar player, a good one, who was once part of a one-hit-wonder band. Now he's working at a guitar store, giving lessons to middle-aged men, and playing gigs with a local band. And trying to keep his head above water as a lot of the assumptions he's made about himself and his life become challenged.

The pacing of the book is slightly uneven, and the very last bit feels a little rushed. Not poorly done, just like the author had a page limit and he was trying to keep telling the story right up to the end, so that the end comes a little abruptly. The story is told strictly from Evan's point of view. We never leave his head, which is the pov that I love best, so that suited me just fine, but I could see some people finding it a little difficult. I fell in love with Evan and his broken head from just about the first sentence and he held me captive all the way through. I give this book two thumbs up.

Comments

[atomicpagan.livejournal.com]

SIX?

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

I KNOW! Seriously, these aren't obscure books on this list. Hell, Harry Potter is seven books all by itself. I feel pretty pathetic that I've only managed thirty-eight of the hundred. I need to get to work on that.

[atomicpagan.livejournal.com]

38 is not bad. I'm irritated that they they think everyone is an idiot.

[arthurfrdent.livejournal.com]

yeah, see, I think the list should only be allowed to be books that you decided to read on your own, not stuffs you read for school. I've read a metric ton of those for literature classes, but basically I don't remember most of them. I've read the lord of the rings at least 25 times though, so what does that mean? I read Crime and Punishment, just so I could tell my snotty english professor great aunt that it was stupid to read about somebody else's misery when there was plenty of it in the real world...

[auntiemeesh.livejournal.com]

To a certain extent, I agree with you. For the most part, the books that I bolded because I read them in school were books that I didn't actually like (Of Mice and Men, The Great Gatsby, etc). On the other hand, there were books that I read because they were required reading for English lit classes in college that I liked at least somewhat, like Lion, Witch and the Wardrobe. And on the other, other hand (I know, I need more hands) there are books like Pride and Prejudice, and Catcher in the Rye, that my older sibs had to read in school, that I went ahead and read because I figured I'd be asked to at some point and then I'd be ahead of the game, and then I really liked them (and then was never actually asked to read them in school - go figure). So maybe, instead of only counting the ones you read on your own, put an asterick next to the ones you actually enjoyed, or read for leisure, not for school, or something like that.