The Big Read Meme

[tallulahgs]

Taken from rushikayu13.

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well, let's see.
1) Bold the books you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Copy, paste, & repeat.
5) Starred next to the books you're reading/have read some of.

Lucy also put a strike through the ones that she read but wasn't fond of. I'll steal that.



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
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 (I feel weird about not loving it, but I just... don't. I admire it hugely and it's really entertaining and well-written, but... I don't LOVE it.)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (this nearly gets a strikethrough, because I have a tendency to rant about it, but I liked it when I was small)
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare *
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (I need to reread. I may love it, but I haven't read it since Year 9, when I wrote an essay comparing it to Jane Eyre. I want to find that essay.)
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
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
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Voyage of the Dawn Treader makes up for my Issues with Last Battle. So it gets loved. Besides, it's part of my childhood.)
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (... and it's on here as a separate book why?)
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 * (okay. Like two pages of it.)
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (I would've said 'love' when I was doing it for GCSEs, but I reread recently and was all '... that's just depressing.')
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (I want to strikethrough, but I liked it except for the ending)
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 * (again, like two pages)
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 (I did love them when I was five! But where is Malory Towers? :D)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks * (one page. Then fled in terror)
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 (why is this not part of the complete works above? I suspect this list LIES)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So... I don't hate much, but I don't plan to read much either? XD

Comments

[likeatruck.livejournal.com]

The Hitchhiker's Guide. :D ♥

[tallulahgs]

Thought you'd say that ^^

[tannakitten.livejournal.com]

I want to read the Hitchhiker's Guide :c And Lord of the Flies. I remember reading one delicious page from that when Piggy died. Mmmm!

Wasp Factory is terrifying, eh? Maybe I'll look into it |3~

Ah, and I picked up 1984 again. It's a lot more interesting than I thought it was before XD Maybe I should try picking up Lolita again too, but I doubt I'll understand a word of it. Damn you Humbert Humbert and your fancy old words!

[tallulahgs]

I think you'd like HHGTG and LotF actually, I recommend them both ^^ Well, with Hitchiker I liked the first two books and then wasn't so enraptured with the other three, but the first is definitely worth a look.

I don't know much about Wasp Factory except that when I flicked through it as a nervous fifteen-year-old I wanted to run screaming, so let me know if you do check it out ^^

I've decided I love 1984 after reading it three times, studying it for A-Level and RPing Shinji Mimura being a fan ^^

[sabethea.livejournal.com]

argh urgh eurgh, Wasp Factory.

I have read it. 15 years ago. It still gives me nightmares. Eeep. *is not good at unpleasant*

There's one particular visual that I have NEVER been able to get out of my head and makes me want to throw up when I think of it. Which is probably good writing, but still...

ETA
Mind you, I cried my way through LotF and haven't ever recovered from that.

I do love 1984, though, big time.

[tallulahgs]

Right, that just underlines my belief that my 15-year-old self was right and this book should be avoided like the plague XD

I don't mind crying, but 'argh urgh eurgh' is something else entirely.

*glomps 1984*