Friday, December 10, 2010

The Big Read list and how I rank on it

I confess freely that I have cribbed this from Nancy at Bookfoolery & Babble. (http://bookfoolery.blogspot.com/) I did change the color coding to suit my taste. I hope she won't mind too terribly as I am a very big fan of her blog.

The Big Read list has been passed around quite a bit, this past week or two, so I thought I'd join in. It's a list of 100 books; the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 or so off this list. They probably have a point. I doubt you'll see anyone outside the book blogging community getting all excited about the list. The average Joe probably has only read what's required or the most popular tripe, right? Anyway, I'm going to alter mine a little.

Black = I have read it



Green = I read part of it but did not finish


Purple = I have read it AND I own a copy
** = A personal favorite from this list


Red =  Not familiar with this one or don't want to read it
Blue = Will eventually read this one

Orange = hated it


And without further ado, here's the list!


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 ** (in hardback, no less)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible


7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte


8. 1984 - George Orwell


9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman


10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott ** (must confess that I liked Little Men better)


12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy


13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller


14. Complete Works of Shakespeare ** (I've read a LOT of Shakespeare, but not EVERYTHING)


15. Rebecca - Daphne DuMaurier
16. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien


17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk


18. Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger
19. The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger


20. Middlemarch - George Elliot


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 Hitchhiker'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. Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. 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 (own an autographed copy and still haven't read it)


40. Winnie the Pooh - A. A. Milne**


41. Animal Farm - George Orwell


42. The DaVinci Code - Dan Brown


43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez


44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving


45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins


46. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. 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 (I don't suppose watching the movie counts?)


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 (you may be noting a trend in my attitude toward Dickens)


58. Brave New World - Alduous Huxley


59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime- 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. The 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 (an entire chapter on the color white?!? GAH)


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 Inferno - Dante**


77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome


78. Germinal - Emile Zola


79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackery


80. Possession - A. S. Byatt**


81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (the only Dickens I can halfway stand)


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 (are you freaking kidding me?!?)


89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 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 O'Toole


96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute


97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare** (not sure why this isn't included w/Complete Works above, but whatever)


99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl**


100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Well, if you take out the 33 that I haven't read and the 6 that I haven't finished, I don't think i finished too shabbily. 61 out of 100. Anyone else want to weigh in?

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