On facebook, I got tagged as a book nerd and this was sent to me: (I've colored red what I've read, with my comments in orange)
Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds---and that would include me. I want to know who's read what.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - x
6 The Bible - (Yep, the whole thing; cover to cover)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte -x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman -
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens -
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy –
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller –
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - the complete works? Isn't that extreme?
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier -
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - x
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 - x
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy -
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams -
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky -
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck- x
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 - x
34 Emma - Jane Austen - x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - x
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - x If I've read Chronicles of Narnia, I've read this! DUH!
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini -
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden -x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - x Which one? There are masses!
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - x Dude -- this is not worthy of reading!
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 - x
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 - x
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth -
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon -
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - x
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - x
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon-
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez -
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov -
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - x
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 - x
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce -
76 The Inferno - Dante - x
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 - x
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 - x
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 - x
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 - x
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - x UMMM -- 'complete works' was listed above, what's up with the double entries?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl -
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - x
Several thoughts arise in my mind about this list. One, there are duplicates, where one entry encompases another. Two, some of these books are not worth reading -- evidence of a good education is knowing what not to read. And three, there are some quality books left off; what of Homer's works? Or sequels of some of these books? Where is Wrinkle in Time? CS Lewis's Space Trilogy? Shall I continue?
What's up BBC? You should have checked the credentials of whoever wrote this list, because they are not very widely read, nor have the read truly quality books!
His Dark Materials - enjoyable, if heretical. I'm glad HHGTTG made it on, but I'm not sure it really belongs. The DaVinci Code?
ReplyDeleteI also read Watership Down last year - a fantastic children's novel.
Another recommendation - The NeverEnding Story
Oops, missed that one. I read Watership Down also, loved it.
ReplyDeleteDidn't know there was a book "the neverending story". I love the movie, though!
yeah, 17 of those books were books that were on Elementary/Middle School/High School required reading lists in my school district...
ReplyDeleteOf course that doesn't mean that a person who went to my school district READ all of the books they were required to, but still, I would suspect that they've read more than 6.
The question is, does this really come from BBC? Or just someone on Facebook who put BBC in there to give it more credit?
ReplyDeleteBut it's an interesting list nonethless. For both good and bad reasons.
The double entries are really strange, and if they put "complete Shakespeare" in there and then list Austens one by one (OK, not all of them, but there aren't so many left after all!), it's rather suspicious behaviour.
Oh, and you should read The Little Prince, and Exupery's other works as well! Really, you should!
And Swallows and Amazons (Ransome in general)! Some of the best children's books there are, believe me!
Being the slightly patriotic Czech that I am, I'd put something by Karel Čapek on the list... RUR? It's mostly claimed important for inventing the word robot, which it did, but it's actually more about humanity than robots, and that's what's so good about it.
Also, I still can't claim Nr 6, which is, I guess, something I really should do something about.