Wednesday, March 11, 2009

What have you been reading?

So, a friend sent me an email with this list and I thought it looked interesting. Supposedly, the BBC believes that most people have only read six books on this list (unverified, of course). My personal count is 37 (those in white and green), and quite a few more are on my to-read list. Beemer's count will be at three next week (those in green). How many have you read?

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 Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’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 Meany - 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 Inferno - Dante
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

10 comments:

Desertbound said...

I've read 25. Guess I better get to crackin'!

Nate and Sum said...

Sadly I've only read 15. I guess that's 8 more than average! :) I promise I do read though. Thanks for posting the list because I need some new books. You definitely need to read the whole Chronicles of Narnia series. I loved them.

Nate and Sum said...

Oh and 75% of Nate's wardrobe consists of Utah State apparrel. Okay maybe only 50%. :)

Kristin said...

I'm at 28--many thanks to James M. James in high school. Good times, good times.

Good list, though. I should show that to my book club.

Anonymous said...

27. Plus a real effort on 7 more that were just too horribly boring to finish. Why don't we get extra points for reading whole series?

Also, to Kristin's point, you left a couple of Jimmy James books in white--1984 and Gatsby.

To kill a Mockingbird was a Flamm book in 9th grade, and I think she made her AP class read Grapes of Wrath--how did you escape it?

Spring said...

I counted 23. I have been looking for more books to read I may need to check some of these out. Let me know if there are any that are just not worth it. I agree with Sheree and Kristin. Thank you Jimmy James. I would not be the reader I am today if not for him.

Rita said...

That's pretty sad that the average is sooo low. I am NOT a big reader... and I have read 9 of them. (I am only now starting to like to read, thanks to Ryan)

DreamPacker said...

40 books on this list. Plus a few that I started and just could not get into. I read most of the books AFTER high school and college where I was an English major.

Jamie said...

I'm at 41. As I was going down the list, I was thinking of Mr. James, too. :)
I'm pretty sure we did read Grapes of Wrath with Flamm....I will never forget the end of THAT one!
I wished we all lived closer so we could be in a book club together, that would be so much fun. Some of the books on the list that I didn't read in high school or college were from my book club.
There were a couple on there that I started, but couldn't get through (His Dark Materials series being one of them.)
That was a fun post to read!

Kristin said...

Wow. Jimmy James really made an impact on us! What a guy. I do appreciate the books he made us read. . . and with such detail! I worked hard on that class. I enjoyed reading Sheree's, Jamie's, Spring's comments on that. We should create a Facebook group in Mr. James' honor. ha ha Maybe I'll write memoirs of past teachers on my blog sometime.