View across the Outer Harbour of Stornoway

Thursday 26 February 2009

Wanted: readers

The BBC say the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list. How many have you read?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ before those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.

Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
x The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
x Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
x Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
x To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
x The Bible - some of it. Had no choice :-/
x Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
x Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
x Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
x Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
x The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch - George Eliot
x Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
x David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion - Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
x Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
x Animal Farm - George Orwell
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Dune - Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
x A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
x Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
x Moby Dick - Herman Melville
x Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
x Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
x Ulysses - James Joyce
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Germinal - Emile Zola
x Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession - AS Byatt
x A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web - EB White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
x Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
x The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
x Watership Down - Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet - William Shakespeare
x Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

26 out of a hundred.

I wonder what other books should be added to this “top books” list though?

13 comments:

  1. I have 36 of those but many of my favorites aren't on there. I don't have TV though and read all the time.

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  2. This looks like the same list I filled out on Facebook, and I think I had 35 or so. I also wondered about the list, and thought it was missing some important books like A Clockwork Orange, etc.

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  3. 5 *but I've seen alot of these as movies*.

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  4. woohoo! I came in at 10! I'm above average! (Wait...it DOES still count if I was forced to read them because I was in Honors classes in high school, right?)

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  5. As Beth say a few of us have already done this on Facebook, but also lamented the fact that there were few comtempory authors to chose from.

    Yasmin

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  6. i am going to show off - 83 out of 100
    i am surprised by some of the choices and agree re the small number of contemporary novels - though pleasantly surprised by the inclusion of some

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  7. Who voted on the choices? I was surprised at some of the more modern authors, and more surprised that there weren't more non-English authors. Where's The Illiad?

    I've read 36 and parts of about 6 others--for instance: the Bible and Shakespeare are hard going. Also, one of these days, I've got to finish Anna Karenina.

    ;^) Jan the Gryphon
    http://gryph-wotd.blogspot.com/

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  8. 27-but some was forced to read in school-liked picking my own books rather than being told what to read.

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  9. 36....thanks,Guido,enjoyed this.

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  10. Many I saw as movies, but may have read in high school.... so about 26 for sure... I'm snagging to do an entry... :)
    Have a good weekend!

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  11. I`ve read 20 of them but I`m not sure whether to count War and Peace as I only managed the first chapter! I also tried Anna Karenina but it was just too miserable for me. I`m proud to say that I read The Grapes of Wrath aged just 10 because my dad told me John Steinback was an excellent author. :o)

    Love Sandra xx

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  12. I have read 19 of them. I did read Gone With The Wind 3 times. I don't know why none of the great Dostoyevsky books are on that list. Especially Crime & Punishment or The Brothers Karamazov. I'm reading The Idiot next.
    Your above posts are quite interesting & a great tribute. So many people don't think about the brave men who fight for us.
    Have a good week.
    Barb (queenb)

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  13. A quick glance, I've read 23 of them, with possibly more but I'd have to think if I read them, or skim-read them, or saw the movie. But, 23 were read (a couple even acted out). I agree that Anna Karenina was too difficult to read the entire way through albeit gosh, what a lovely movie it made.

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