llcoolvad: (joy!)
llcoolvad ([personal profile] llcoolvad) wrote2008-06-26 08:50 pm
Entry tags:

book meme

So I started to do this harmless books meme, but in my inevitable linksy searchage, I found out that this isn't the right list, and that the whole business about average adults reading 6 books thing is pulled out of someone's ass. So here's the meme, my comments, and additions (sorry  [profile] kicking_k!!):

"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own LJ

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR 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 (started!)
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 (most!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (saw the movie!)
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 (seriously, some day i gotta read this)
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 (I love other Irving, just can't bring myself to read this one)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (and all the sequels)
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 (I at least intend to see the movie)
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  (I at least intend to see the movie)
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 (saw the movie)
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 (I didn't really finish this, but I read most of it!)
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 

62 read here. Sigh. Sometimes I feel like I've read for an entire lifetime and haven't even scratched the surface.
A couple books I loved that I just couldn't mark as loved for various reasons. Like Charlotte's Web. Damned book made me cry EVERY TIME. And Wasp Factory was CREEPY. Awesomely creepy. There are very few things on here that I read and hated. Really not fond of Dickens, and every list like this (especially brit-centric ones like this) is just RIDDLED with Dickens. Not saying I hate him, but I might not throw money if he were speaking.  But really, some of this was pretty damned arbitrary. 5 People You Meet in Heaven? DaVinci Code? Seriously? 

Research: So I had to know more. From the BBC's The Big Read: In April 2003 the BBC's Big Read began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books.  Judging from the list on the actual BBC site, this list has been bastardized a bit. Easy to tell, because LOTR is supposed to be #1. So then I found this:http://rabidpaladin.com/archive/2008/06/25/book-geek.aspx, who is apparently even crazier than I. Nowhere is there the 6 books claim.

Commentary: So interesting how different the British top 100 is from an imagined American top 100. Not that I can find a good source right now other than the Random House one. God, my people love Ayn Rand and L Ron Hubbard! Shudder. But there should be some Hemingway, Updike, even King! Especially if you're dragging in Helen Fielding. Oh, here's a good one, Entertainment Weekly's best from 1983-2008. That's pretty American. But perhaps too recent. 



OK, I am obviously still obsessive and feverish.  

 

[identity profile] livingdeb.livejournal.com 2008-06-27 04:28 am (UTC)(link)
Yes, yes, yes, you must read Watership Down. I also didn't read it until I was an adult. Good book.

[identity profile] kicking-k.livejournal.com 2008-06-30 09:04 am (UTC)(link)
I have to say I am extremely doubtful that the Big Read list really represents British reading preferences all that much, because there are HUGE bestsellers (Jeffrey Archer, for example) that aren't on there. Also, I'm pretty sure that a lot of readers who don't see literature as a popularity contest won't have voted - I don't think I did! I always have terrible difficulty choosing one favourite book (or even a top ten).

One thing that does come out through the list is the British tendency to feel that they ought to have read the "canon", even if they haven't. And a tendency to say that one's favourite book is Pride and Prejudice even if you last read it ten years ago. I don't think this is snobbery, exactly, so much as a feeling that only the classics are Proper Books and that claiming something less highbrow as your favourite is a bit of a cop-out.