Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Just for fun

I saw this on another blog, and couldn't resist cutting and pasting here. Feel free to cut and paste to your own blog; let me know if you do, so I can look to see if anyone is as lame as me. I'll make some commentary at the end, or after the entry in a different color.

According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. Look at the list. Bold those you have read. Italicize those you intend to read. Put a star next to the ones you LOVED. My answers are already marked.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling (I couldn't get through the first one)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (it didn't say I had to remember it)
6. The Bible* (Okay, so I've read parts, loved what I read, and intend to read the rest)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. 1984 - 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. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Romeo, Romeo, whereforeout thou?)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (see response to 5, mandatory high school reading)
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (competes w/ Dostoyesvsky as worst book EVER)
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 (competes w/Fitzgerald as worst book EVER)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck******** (love, love, love this book)
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 - CS Lewis
34. Emma - 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 (another high school read that I think I liked)
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 Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (does it count that I've seen the movie?)
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (isn't this a porno?)
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (don't make me feel guilty I didn't read the book by the guy from Detroit...)
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 (books about rabbits will most likely make me cry, no way, no how will I read this...)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (don't like the candy bar, why would I read the book?)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (again, the movie doesn't count?)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Wow, sounds like a lot of boring reading going on there. Most of those authors are long dead. Personally, I read for entertainment, I don't like to think about what I'm reading (much less translate, so Shakespeare is out). Where is the good stuff like Dean Koontz? Robin Cook? Old Stephen King stuff? Sidney Sheldon? Or after I read some really scary/deep/intense stuff, I'll even admit to reading a chick-flickesque type book like Jude Deveraux, Jodi Piccoult, or Kathleen Woodiwess (sp?) on occasion just to lighten up.

Now that you know my ever so important take on this important subject, I'll shut up! John's two year birthday is Friday, so I'll have pictures of his family party early next week.

1 comment:

Tam said...

OK...jeez. I only read, like, 7 of those and I'm never without a book!