book meme

[seryn]

Book meme
List of 100 books, which have you read?

it has a long traceback before it's locked:
viklikesfic's one, effex's two, ciceqi's three, rhi's four, which directs to the empty DW of keerawa which directs to keerawa for five, tifaching for six, dante_s_hell for seven, which directs to avictoriangirl which is flocked.

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Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.

[My addition: please note that many of these items are several whole books while others are single volumes, it skews the results dramatically when Wuthering Heights is equivalent to The Complete Works of Shakespeare, though Hamlet is listed separately. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia is listed as a series but the first book is included separately. And Anne of Green Gables is the name of one of the books as well as the series. I was told His Dark Materials by Pullman is the name of the series, but I thought that also was the name of one of the books in the series. I think this list is extremely skewed because of these issues.]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. 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'Ubervilles - 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 Traveler’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 Hitchhiker'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 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 - 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 Madam 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


If you're shocked that I haven't read all of the HP series, considering I used to write for its fandom, you should know that I skipped book 7. I own it. I read the epilogue. I decided that JKR could not be trusted with the characters she created and I did not read the rest of it. There is no Earthly excuse for anyone marrying the Ron Weasley we have been shown in the previous books. And I hate Ginny Weasley so much (mostly for trying to kill a bunch of her schoolmates including Hermione Granger without being fucking sorry-- and it would have been easy to forgive her because her only fault was covering up a weirdness) that I felt sickened by Harry marrying her.

From this list, if I have bolded it saying that I read all of it, it was worth reading. There aren't many things listed here that I have finished and thought were unworthy. Bridget Jones' Diary comes close. I skimmed it after reading the beginning, a bit in the middle and being completely mystified by the end (not the result, but that people were enthusiastic about the book.)  


 

Comments

[thistleingrey]

Oh, this one again--first seen three or four years ago, maybe. I've read 74 of these, which doesn't seem worth the time to add bold tags to. (None of the ones I have not read has a film version, AFAIK.)

[seryn]

I think I've seen this before. I doubt I would have participated if I hadn't been intrigued by the long trace-back chain and the ability to rant about the skew in the selection. :-)

I'm almost surprised you haven't read all of these since you have a much greater tolerance toward healthy reading than I do. You even finished that October Daye character's book when I was already frustrated at 30 pages in.

You should see me being greatly amused that you have skipped ones lacking in film versions. :-D I don't know why that strikes me as hilarious, but it does. Thanks for saying it.

[thistleingrey]

And then I misconstrued you, so I have deleted to start over....

The key really is whether a book was around when I was in high school, which is when I read most of the 74.

[seryn]

Yup, there was a disconnect. No worries. I was really amused by the correlation and had to smile and share. I figured you pointed it out for that reason.

I know I read a lot of intellectual stuff in school, but it must have been more obscure than this! We read a gob of Whitman and Kafka one year, seemingly in alternation.

[thistleingrey]

When I was in high school != assigned for a class....

(I was perplexed by the idea that anyone would count having read a book if they've seen the film, full stop.)