My friend Heidi did this on her blog, so I decided to as well.
*** Here is a list put forth by the National Endowment for the Arts in the US. It lists the top 100 books, and asks how many you’ve actually read.The Big Read [which is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts designed to restore reading to the center of American culture] reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
Edit**See below for more information regarding this list
I have colored the ones I have read. .. .- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
- Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web - EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Thanks for reading!P.S. The list is random, not in order of importance -
So I have read 33 of them, if I counted right. Not bad, I guess.
Some of the books seem to repeat a bit, like 14 says the complete works of Shakespere (who has read the complete works?), and 98 is Hamlet. Also with the Chronicles of Narnia. But still interesting.
Tell me how many you have read, and also give me a recommendation of some to read that I have not yet read. I am not interested in all these books, but I'm always looking for another good read!
Tag. .. if you wish. . . Do this on your blog and let us all see what you have read.
***EDIT: I found a little more info regarding this list of books: The list I posted is the result of a poll/survey conducted online last year by World Book Day. "The 2,000 people who took part in the poll online at worldbookday.com nominated their top 10 titles that they could not live without." - wrote The Guardian in an article published on March 1st. And then they take us to the list - in HERE . So this list is just for fun, as far as I'm concerned.
7 comments:
I have only read 16 of these. Yikes!
Too many are chick books!
No John Grisham or Michael Crichton? No Golf books?!
The one book that I've read that I'm suprised didn't make it was The Good Earth by Pearl Buck.
I guess I'll have to try a few of these.
Well, i better get reading something besides Twilight...that didn't make the list?? :)
I've read 11...not too great.
I've read more than half. I guess that temporary pursuit of an English major did me some good - I can feel smug at times. However, how a lot of these books made anyone's list of top 10 titles they couldn't live without is beyond me.
Interesting list - helpful and I will focus on reading more books from this list. However - there is nothing on the list that is historical or biographical. Where is David McCoullough, William Manchester, Joseph Ellis and the Sharaars? Surely their works are as important as JK Rowling! Also - how about something from the world of sports? Try reading The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn. I have read about 25% of the books.
I have read 34 of the books, if my memory services me correctly. I am always happy to see a list of good books to read so will check out some of them.
I agree that it doesn't have some books that I have really liked. No S. Meyer, no Shannon Hale, etc., plus I also liked some of the historical books that Brian mentioned. But fun to look at.
Hmmmm...an english major, and I've only read 33...I guess I should be ashamed of myself. Interesting list. Besides missing the authors mentioned on other comments, I would like to see Francis Hodgson Burnett and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. Interesting post.
that's a pretty good percentage kristie.
to be honest i couldn't even get thru reading the list.
hee hee.
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