Lifted and reprinted with my notations from Roxi Fox’s blog.
FWIW I have no idea who or what “The Big Read” is but I’m appalled there’s no Toni Morrison on here. Or DeLillo. Or Walker Percy. Or “The Sheltering Sky.” Or “The Corrections.” Or “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” I thought Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Everything is Illuminated” was a wonder. Ditto “The Hours.” And if you’re going to include kids’ lit, where’s “A Wrinkle in Time” or “Bridge to Terabithia”?!? There are easily a dozen more books/authors that I could name right now that really ought to be on this list instead of “The Secret History” (which is one of those weird books, like “Geek Love” that I seem to see on everyone’s bookshelf). I’m a little more in favor of Time Magazine’s list, personally (it was the first to come in when I Googled “100 best books of all time”). Not sure what my notations below say about me. Probably mostly that I stopped reading books regularly around 1998 and that I clearly have something against the Russians.
I promise I’ll write substantively about kink again soon. Got a couple of posts in the works, in fact. 🙂
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read less than 6 and force books upon them.
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 Faulks
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 –
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 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
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’ 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 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
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
There’s a part in “Their Eyes Were Watching God” where Janie’s watching the bees fertilizing the pear tree. I love that part so much, I’ve considered having those paragraphs tattooed on my back, or painting them on my bedroom wall. ZNH is definitely in my top 20 favorite writers.
Do you think she and Dorothy Parker ever met or hung out?
Don’t have a blog but here’s the ones I’ve read. (faves underlined).
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams – sublime
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
Winnie the Pooh –
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert – awesome
Bridget Jones’ Diary – Helen Fielding
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The life of Pi? A tosh of pseudo intellectual self-indulgent hogwash. In my humble opinion that is ha-ha But what do I know? I’m not a Booker prize judge! That’s an afternoon of my life that I’ll never get back.
STS
@saskia
I just went through my entire library and can’t find my copy of the book! Grr! And I know I have it cause I re-read it within the past year. But I found the passage you were talking about on Google books. And … yes.
As for ZNH and DP … I don’t know. But I think they’d enjoy themselves together.
@anon/STS
I liked Life of Pi. Though I kinda know what you mean. I suspect I’d feel about “The Five People You Meet in Heaven” as you do about “Pi” which is why it’s not even italicized in my list… 😉
What a weird list that is: classics up to mid 20th century, kids’ books, random handful of recent ones, Bridget arggh Jones?
I’ve read 20 something of them but as usual MTO’s extras are quite to the point. And what about, top of my head, Italo Calvino? Pynchon? E.M. Forster? Faulkner? O. Henry? Chandler? Henry James? Borges? Homer?
And MTO, wordplay lover, you just have to dive into Lolita again. It’s so worth it.
I was sad when I finished Time Traveler’s Wife.
Bridget Jones and no Beloved? No Bastard Out of Carolina (one of my all time most cherished books)? No Pippi Longstockings?
I think we should make our own list.
sadly, I am not much of a reader, but I have read more then the 6, but that was because I wanted to get thru High School….. add another 6 or so that I had gotten the cliff notes too.. oh well. I do read the whole paper now, instead of just the sports section.
Hmmm… an educational post. I was surprised to see that you stopped reading books 10 years ago. I mean, has this effected you in anyway? Scrabble scores or anything?
My record is much worse, I bolded the couple that I “knocked off” in high school or in the case of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (thank god it was on the list, so I had more than one), grade school.
I have the attention span of an ant when it comes to reading superfluous words (literature), not unless it’s one of your steamy recaps of a session. I guess it’s a matter of me knowing the writer and liking the subject matter then, eh?
I thought Old Yeller should have been on the list– still makes me cry.
These I’ve read and in many cases re-read:
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
Bleak House – Charles Dickens
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Winnie the Pooh –
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Dune – Frank Herbert
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Germinal – Emile Zola
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
Charlotte’s Web – EB White
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Watership Down – Richard Adams
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Started not but did not finish:
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Complete Works of Shakespeare
The Bible
A few random thoughts: I did well on the dystopias, not so well on the 19th century women.
I’d also say that since this list includes both the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet that I get to add something and I choose Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson. Not really novel so much as a series of interconnected short stories, but I love that book and the sad, lonely, interior lives of its characters.
I’d prefer they skip the children’s books and put those in a separate list. My favorite kids book is Swimmy by Leo Leoni btw. Not only do I like the illustrations, but the book’s messages – not to take council of your fears, the power of collective action and that it is ok, great even, to be different – are ones that are good for kids to hear.
Finally I was glad to see The Handmaiden’s Tale made the list. Not that I consider it the best book I’ve ever read, but for a BDSm blog I thought it was a welcome addition. I always remember, when I fantasize about captivity and abandonment, a line from the book when the main character recalls looking at paintings of harem girls. She realizes, now that she herself is kept, that the harem girl’s lives were not exciting and sybaritic, but rather ones of lonlieness and boredom. (Please note this does not mean that I rule out the possibility of me an extended session at some point)
@anon/Lolita
Passage to India was pretty great. Baoum. Baoum.
Sigh. Lolita. Lo-Li-Ta. I want to say something here, but I can’t.
@mistresscrimson
Oh. Yes. Bastard out of Carolina was pretty fantastic. Just gutted me.
I like the idea of our own list! Seems like there’s one forming in the omissions alone!
@lee
I find myself reading more of the paper than I used to as well. If you’ve read a dozen on this list, you probably had a decent high school.
@pk
I didn’t *stop* … more like I slowed from my typical 3-4 books a month to a book every 2-3 months. Most of my reading these days are magazines. Every once in a while, I’ll get hold of a book … or rather, it will get hold of me and I will eat right through it in one sitting. The Potter series did that with me nearly every time (I read the last book in 24 hrs.). When I was in OR in Feb. I couldn’t sleep, started reading Tom Perrotta’s “Little Children” and finished it in four hours. SO satisfying. Love it when that happens. I want to read more books. I’m working on it.
@mark
Which Mark are you? Loved your comment about the dystopias/19th Cen women. 😀
I’m with you on the Shakespeare/Hamlet thing. Made no sense to me.
Swimmy sounds good. I’ll look for it next time I’m in a bookstore. “Handmaid’s Tale” was a good read. I liked her “Cat’s Eye” too. Great comments!
Dear Troy,
Sorry for the confusion, I signed up for a Blogger account using my nom de kink “Mark”, but my real name is Joe. We met at Wynter’s party for VonDoom a few years ago, you licked my teeth.
As mediocre as that list is, it has sort of inspired me to fill in some of the gaps (ok, chasms really) in my reading: Jane Austen, Thomas Hardy, George Eliot, etc. It also made me realize that I end up re-reading lots of stuff (e.g. Heart of Darkness umpteen times)and might be better served by trying new things.
BTW, Swimmy is more of little kids book (4-5), so it’s about a 2 minute read, and is my standard gift for baby showers.
Great blog.
J