Monday 18 August 2008

Top 100 Books Meme

I received this Book Meme from Sara of Much Ado About Something The BBC began broadcasting this through 'The Big Read' in 2003. The National Endownment for the Arts in America estimates that the average adult has only read 6 of the books from this current list. As did Sara, I thought it would be fun to see how many I have read. If you want to take on this challenge, let me know and I will come and look at your scores.

1. Bold those you have read

2. Italicize those you intend to read

3. [Bracket] those you have viewed via movie, TV or theatre



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

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

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’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]

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]

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]

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]

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)


My Score:
I have read 37

I intend to read 7 (and already have them)

I have viewed 49

If you decide to do this, I am sure you know that you do not have to type it all out, just copy and past it and then alter for your own scores.

Sara found this interesting link
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/100books/bbcbigread.htm

12 comments:

Anonymous said...

Seems an odd collection... You've read a good many! I've read 28 of these and seen 27 (more often if you count the various versions of, say, Jane Eyre).

Elizabeth said...

I agree -it is an odd collection but sort of fun to look at. I am about to count mine.

a woman who is said...

So fun to read this right now. I was just over at Sara's reviewing her book list. I am so excited; I just found some E.G. books finally! Bye the way I cannot believe you a proper English gal have not read Pride and Prejudice
:0)

Vee said...

Please add "The Little Prince"...you'll be glad that you did!

Thank you for the gentle reminders. You're exactly correct. The minute I start trying to "work it out" things start going haywire and I get stressed.

Have a wonderful afternoon and evening, Barbara!

Patsy said...

I didn't do to bad but saw more movies then read these books.
Patsy

Nana Trish is Living the Dream said...

Thanks for missing me. I went on vacation and then had so much work to catch up on that it was exhausting. I'm back in the saddle though. Thanks for your kind words. I enjoy seeing the books you've read. I so wish I would have kept a journal on all mine. When I read them and comments about them. I should start that and have them for the future.

Willow said...

I agree that the collection seems quite varied. Do you know how the list was chosen? I did a mental 'yes, read that', 'no, haven't read that yet' list as I went down the list. I'll have to sit down (maybe later today after tutoring) and do an official count.

Lavinia said...

We have read some of the same books! I have seen this list on various websites....I went through it and I think I've read 22 or was it 26 of these books....but some of them, I do not feel compelled to read at all.....

So many books, so little time!

Sara at Come Away With Me said...

That was interesting Barbara, thanks for doing the meme.

I agree it's an odd collection of titles; I have forgotten how they were chosen (I read about it someplace in my researching...)

Barbara said...

What an interesting list. I have counted for myself and ended up with 47 (including the classical ones we once read at school and which I should read again). I love books :-) !!

Anonymous said...

Now if they were movies I could bold more than half. As for reading books, sadly only a few. Do you count all 7 Harry Potters as one or seven????

Anonymous said...

Now if they were movies I could bold more than half. As for reading books, sadly only a few. Do you count all 7 Harry Potters as one or seven????