Meme: The Big Read

[full_metal_ox]

Courtesy of kosaginolegion :

The Big Read thinks the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books they've printed below.

Bold the titles you've read; underline the ones you loved; italicize the ones you plan to read; strike out the ones you hated or have no intention of ever reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen(1)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (1)
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling 
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (2)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (1)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (Gratia Bowii.  The Latin is almost certainly botched, but I'm sure the Thin White Duke has been misconjugated by an awful lot of people.)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (The partial underline is quite deliberate;  Pullman's dramatic and ideological payoff fell quite a bit short of the promise his richly inventive worldbuilding offered.)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (2)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare  (2)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger   I'm...quiet; a loner; a decent enough sort, but eccentric and hard to get to know...suffered bullying in school..and I found Holden Caulfield a tedious, self-pitying little pain in the kazoo who used the word "phony" as a knee-jerk condemnation of anything he personally didn't like.  My role model for adolescent alienation was Elric of Melnibone, thank you, whose self-destructive angst took active, pissed-off, grand-operatic, story-producing forms.  With panache.  (For what it's worth, my down-to-earth and well-adjusted Fraternal Unit loved the book.  Go figure.) 
(Note: Penelope Garcia, if you should happen to be reading this: I hated the @#$%!* book.)
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (2)
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 (The first volume is as far as I got; I never got a sense of a soul underlying the snarkety-snark-snark.)
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   #36 is as far as I've gotten, although Puddleglum's famous speech in The Silver Chair inspired one of my listed interests.
34. Emma - Jane Austen (1)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen (1)
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis This, as the most famous book in the series, and the first to be adapted for cinema, may be the only one a lot of people have read.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden  Although I suspect I'd still prefer Liza Dalby's take on the subject.
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell It came in handy in deciphering Pink Floyd's Animals.
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown  Brown's ideas are hoary gray-whiskered old news to anyone who's decently read in occult and conspiracy literature, or even a regular listener to Coast to Coast A.M,  Oh, and Dennis Hurley would like you to know that albinism doesn't work that way.
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 (1)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (1)
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  Very much a tale of the Innocent Child/Wise Fool versus pervasive adult hypocrisy.  What, I wonder, do readers themselves on the spectrum think of the book?
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck It shed some light on various Warner Brothers cartoons.
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov  Remember, kids: portrayal=/=advocacy.
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 (2)
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 (Over forty years ago; all I remember is some lame kid who played a flute. I made my mom a clay figurine of the character.)
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  (I identified like crazy with Ignatius.  Do not consider this self-flattery.)
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 -- The sequel's not so good, though.
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

(1) There are certain titles I feel I ought to read, as fundamental building blocks of a particular genre or examples of a given strain of thought. Specifically, I've been given to understand that the Brontes and Jane Austen represent opposite poles of attitude in women's fiction of the period.
(2) Left to my own devices, I'll frequently read books in a scattershot and nonsequential fashion, beginning at whatever page the book  opens to and going back later to fill in the preceding details. These are books I know myself to have read in that fashion.

 

Comments

[kosaginolegion.livejournal.com]

If you decide you want to read Austen, I have an omnibus. Will confess that I have never read Bronte - nor do I plan to.

As regards "Secret Garden" I think the flute player and the cripple were two different characters.

Do you have "Curious incident" and if so, may I borrow?

[dungeonwriter.livejournal.com]

Elric of Melnibone, thank you, whose self-destructive angst took active, pissed-off, grand-operatic, story-producing forms.

AMEN!!!

[full-metal-ox.livejournal.com]

So are you expressing love for Elric, hatred for Holden Caulfield, or both?

(My comments upon that book include some references that may require explanation; "Catcher in the Rye" has a reputation as a favorite among serial killers, and Penelope Garcia (a comics geek, incidentally, who has canonically likened herself to Oracle) is the resident hacker on "Criminal Minds.")