Sunday, November 1, 2009

a list of books

I heard about this article on the big read that said the average adult has only read 6 books from this list (of 100), which seems kinda shocking to me. 

i've gone through the list and marked the ones i have read:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - yes

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien –yes

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - no (i kinda hate the bronte sisters)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – yes
5
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - yes
6 The Bible – yes
7
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - yes (the reason i kinda hate the bronte sisters)
8
1984 - George Orwell -no
9
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - yes
10
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - yes
11
Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - yes
12
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –no
13
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – no
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – not complete works, but the majority
15
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - no
16
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - yes
17
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - no
18
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - no *but we own it
19
The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - no
20
Middlemarch - George Eliot- no
21
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - no
22
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - yes
23
Bleak House - Charles Dickens- no
24
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - no *but we own it
25
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - no
26
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - no
27
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - no *but we own it
29
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - yes
30
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - read to me by my dad
31
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - yes
32
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - no
33
The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis -yes
34
Emma - Jane Austen - yes
35
Persuasion - Jane Austen -yes (my favorite jane austen novel)
37
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - yes
38
Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- no
39
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - yes
40
Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – no
41
Animal Farm - George Orwell -yes
42
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - no
43
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - no
44
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - no
45
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - no
46
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - no
47
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - no (it's on my "to read" list)
48
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - no
49
Lord of the Flies - William Golding - yes
50
Atonement - Ian McEwan - no
51
Life of Pi - Yann Martel - yes
52
Dune - Frank Herbert- no
53
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - no
54
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - yes
55
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - no
56
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - no
57
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - no
58
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - yes
59
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - yes
60
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - saddly, no
61
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – yes
62
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - no
63
The Secret History - Donna Tartt - no (it's on my "to read" list)
64
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – yes
65
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - yes (josh's favorite book)
66
On The Road - Jack Kerouac - no
67
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - no
68
Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - yes
69
Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - no
70
Moby Dick - Herman Melville - no
71
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - no (but i know all the words to the musical)
72
Dracula - Bram Stoker - no
73
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - yes
74
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - no
75
Ulysses - James Joyce - no
76
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - no
77
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - no
78
Germinal - Emile Zola - no
79
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - no
80
Possession - AS Byatt- no
81
A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens -yes
82
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - no
83
The Color Purple - Alice Walker -no
84
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - yes
85
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - no
86
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - no
87
Charlotte's Web - EB White - no?
88
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - yes
89
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - yes
90
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – no
91
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - no
92
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupe – no
93
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - no
94
Watership Down - Richard Adams - no
95
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - no
96
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - no
97
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - yes
98
Hamlet – Shakespeare – yes

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - yes
100
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - no

my total: 38 books.
i thought maybe i would have read more than that (maybe josh is right and i only read books popular with 12-year-old-boys) 
i've never even heard of some of them (which makes me feel really dumb)

how many have you read? (or never heard of before??)





3 comments:

  1. I've read 42 - and 6 more if you count half-way attempts (war and peace, anna karinena, lord of the rings, brideshead revisited, remains of the day, lolita)

    also, if you only read 12-year old books, you would have def. read the little prince (has pictures), watership down(has talking rabbits), and of course, charlotte's web! just sayin'...

    cool list, by the way. i may reblog, and it gave me tons of ideas for books to read!

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  2. i've read fifty....

    i'm not sure if that is a good thing to admit to in means i must spend far too much time on my own reading books.....oh dear, i will put being more social on my list of things to do....after i finish the book i'm reading now!

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  3. I only read ten of these although I read a lot. I've heard of most of them.

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