furrbear: (LeatherBear)
[personal profile] furrbear
The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

Look at the list and...

1) 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 so we can try and track down these people who've only read six and push books upon them.


1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. 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 – 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. The Complete Works of Shakespeare

16. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien

17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18. A 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

25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

28. The 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. The Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34. Emma – Jane Austen

35. Persuasion – Jane Austen

36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. 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 – A.A. 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 – LMMontgomery

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 (the original set - not the stuff by his son)

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' 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

79. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

80. Possession – A.S. 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 – E.B. 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 (Le Petit 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

SIX? How the hell did they get through High School?

56 read. 21 to read. Did I miss any of the good reads? Several good reads on the site's list of Featured Books.

Date: 2009-01-28 10:15 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] genxcub.livejournal.com
I'm definitely NOT a book reader. While I do read a lot, it tends to be online and periodicals.

I only netted 13 on that list, mostly due to high school.

Date: 2009-01-28 10:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] furrbear.livejournal.com
Around 36 of those read from that list were probably by the time I graduated High School, but I started early. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was third grade.

Date: 2009-01-29 12:32 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] bitterlawngnome.livejournal.com
does it count if you know you've read it but found it so boring you can't remember a thing about it?

Date: 2009-01-29 12:48 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] furrbear.livejournal.com
Certainly. I also have a few of those in my mental collection.

Date: 2009-01-29 05:28 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] pink-halen.livejournal.com
It's interesting how the list has changed over the years. I have read a couple of classics that are not on the list like "1984" and "Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court." They include very short books with very long ones. There are several books that would be a struggle to get through like "War and Peace." I certainly wouldn't wallow through Jane Austin. I have to confess that on this list I have listened to audio books of several like "War and Peace", Harry Potter, and His Dark Materials. I have seen performaces of most of Shakespeare but isn't that how Shakespeare is suppose to be presented? I've not read the Bible cover to cover. The only books that I have read in paper form from this list is "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." However, to be picky, it was first presented as a radio play then was printed.

Date: 2009-01-29 05:46 am (UTC)
From: [identity profile] furrbear.livejournal.com
Somewhere around here I have the original BBC radio series of HHGTTG on cassette as it was broadcast on NPR.

Austen, Bronte, Hardy's Tess, Tolstoy's Karenina and Flaubert's Bovary were for a college lit course. Austen and Bronte are the all the rage on PBS' Masterpiece Theatre - I avoid them at any cost anymore.

Shakespeare reads as well, if not better than, as it watches.

I'd replace a bunch of the Austen and Bronte titles on this list with Twain, Faulkner, Steinbeck, etc...

Date: 2009-01-29 10:09 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] colicub.livejournal.com
1984 is number 8 on the list.

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