The Big Read

[rikibeth]

okay, I wasn't gonna bother, because I figure everyone I know has read more than six of these, but the_red_shoes did, so now I won't be able to ignore it.

seriously, how could I even carry on a conversation with anyone who'd only managed to read six? What would we talk about?

Not going to bother with italics-bold-underline, although I will strikethrough the ones I LOATHED.


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 (well, PARTS of it, but have never gone through the whole thing AND I'M NOT GOING TO YOU CAN'T MAKE ME)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (I was supposed to, but I was ahead of myself in French and math in high school, and that meant I had scheduling conflicts with the class that did 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 (Okay okay I admit it I haven't read through ALL the plays. I have a perfectly reasonable working knowledge of the popular ones and I would know MORE if I hadn't had Midsummer Night's Dream for THREE SEPARATE CLASSES. Not that I don't love it. I'm sure I've read all the sonnets but not all memorized or anything.)
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 (NO, NO, NO, AND YOU CAN'T MAKE ME)
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 Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (large chunks memorized)
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 (Look, is Nicholas Nickleby going to be on here? Only Dickens I read, and that because the stage play had Roger Rees, who was desperately handsome to my twelve-year-old eyes.)
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (what's with the duplication?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (The autobiography of the ACTUAL geisha whose interviews were a big base for this book was a lot more interesting actually.)
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 Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (I do not care WHAT the_red_shoes says, I LOVED THESE. ALL OF THEM. ANNE RULES.)
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (No, but I saw it as a play last year, when my daughter had the role of Jack, which was a REALLY FABULOUS PART)
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 (And I was very confused to discover an actual prescription painkiller called soma, many years later.)
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 (OMG SO MUCH LOVE)
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 (I tried, probably will try again...)
80. Possession - AS Byatt (Yes! Awesome book. But I skimmed the pastiche poetry.)
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 (I keep feeling like I SHOULD because, no shit, he was my second grade Hebrew school teacher and he was the only good Hebrew school teacher I ever had, but OMG it looks so schmaltzy. )
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Oh HELL yes, have the annotated edition, adore them)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Does it count if I've only ever read it in French?)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (Not until last summer! But I did, finally.)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (No, but I mean to, since PZB loves it so much)
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute (I got nothin'. Isn't that a Jam song? Wait, no, that's A Town Called Malice.)
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Again with the weird duplication thing)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (no but I know the musical down to the fucking recitatives...)

Comments

[head-shrinker.livejournal.com]

This is obviously biased toward people who do NOT read.

Why?

I count at LEAST four titles off the top of my head that have series/sequels/etc after them (Alice in Wonderland, Anne of Green Gables, Watership Down, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) that are not listed. And chances are, if you read one you read more. Espeically if you liked them.

And WTF with listing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe separate from The Chronicles?

READ, people!

[bigbrotherinlaw.livejournal.com]

If you liked Gatsby and Of Mice and Men, read the Grapes of Wrath. It's not as good as OMaM but it's worth the time.

Also, What's up with having read the Three Musketeers, but not the Count of Monte Cristo!

Happy reading! You're 9 ahead of me.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

I only sorta liked Gatsby and OMaM. Those were definitely read-for-school items.

I wanna know why there's no Chandler on this list. He may not have been a 20th-century Shakespeare, but his work had a LOT of far-reaching influence!

[actual-size.livejournal.com]

I read The Five People You Meet In Heaven in one sitting when Stef's uncle pressed it on me while we were visiting. And it was a schmaltzy piece of crap that I wanted to throw out the window. But I liked and respected Stef's uncle far too much to tell him that.

[rikibeth.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I suspected as much. All I can say is, in 1978, he was a totally awesome Hebrew school teacher.

[pocketpolina.livejournal.com]

Where is Miss Woolf? Surely somebody could have bothered to include To The Lighthouse or Mrs Dalloway (I won't mention Orlando despite my love of it because I know how you feel about it)

PS Very few people read Shakespeare's complete works. There are a lot plays that sort of slip through the cracks.