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Altoids Addict (![[info]](http://www.journalfen.net/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} altoidsaddict) wrote,@ 2008-06-27 15:37:00 |
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"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 intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 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 (Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest)
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 - 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-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 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
I just went through and bolded the ones I've read. Saying I intend to read a book seems to doom it to a literary purgatory.
I must say, if you've grown up under a predominantly white, Judeo-Christian culture, it is indeed troubling if you've only read 6 of these. However, I find it a bit disingenuous to condemn someone who's perhaps read 6 very, very good and well-crafted books on this list next to, say, someone who's read twice as many on the list - but only the light fiction. I'll defend Stephen King's literary prowess as the day is long, but damned if I'll argue that whether or not someone's read Yann Martel or Dan Brown makes for a literary mind. The former is a plagiarist, and the latter never met an ellipses he didn't like. For that matter, does it make me more literary that, of the French literature on the list, I've read most of them in French and not in English at all?
Consider the merits and lack thereof of basing a worthwhile literature list on popularity as opposed to the critical thinking involved in reading or just absorbing text. People fucking heat their homes with remaindered copies of Bridget Jones' Diary. While this list, as it was constructed, does indicate... something about our literary values, this includes the bad as well as the good.
This is a list of the 100 most worthwhile books you absolutely, positively must read. Some of these books are quite distasteful to read, but are nonetheless important. Some of these books may not appear on the surface to be philosophical or incredibly deep, but have moved people nonetheless. I haven't read all of these necessarily, but I have read the vast majority. Like any such list, this is entirely subjective - and the fun comes in debating the results!
1. Bold the ones you've read.
2. Of the ones you have not read, substitute five of them with books you feel need to be included.
3. Pass it on!
My list:
1. The Giver by Lois Lowry
2. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
5. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
6. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
8. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
10. The Bible, any translation
11. Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb
12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
15. Cane by Jean Toomer
16. So Far from God by Ana Castillo
17. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
18. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. Yama by Alexandre Kuprin
21. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
22. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
23. Family Ties by Clarice Lispector
24. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
25. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
27. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
28. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
29. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
30. Barefoot Gen series by Keiji Nakazawa
31. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
32. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
33. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
34. The Woman Who Owned The Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen
35. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
36. Cruddy by Lynda Barry
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. The Qur'an
39. The Niebelungenlied
40. The Stranger by Albert Camus
41. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
42. The Shining by Stephen King
43. Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
44. Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi
45. From Hell by Alan Moore
46. The Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
47. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
48. Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
49. Naked by David Sedaris
50. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
51. Sus Majores Poemas by Ruben Dario
52. The poetry of Pablo Neruda
53. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
54. Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez
55. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
56. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
57. The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
58. Native Son by Richard Wright
59. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
60. Lysistrata by Aristophanes
61. Medea by Euripedes
62. Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles
63. Poems by Sappho
64. The Aeneid by Vergil
65. Paradise Lost by John Milton
66. The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
67. Tartuffe by Moliere
68. Middlemarch by George Eliot
69. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
70. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
71. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
72. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
73. 1984 by George Orwell
74. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
75. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
76. Harry Potter series by J. K. rowling
77. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
78. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
79. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
80. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
81. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
82. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
83. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
84. Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin
85. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
86. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke
87. Upanishads
88. Candide by Voltaire
89. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
90. Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
91. Stories by Saki
92. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
93. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
94. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos
95. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore
96. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
97. The Giver by Lois Lowry
98. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
99. Invisible Man by Harlan Ellison
100. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
I'm sure I forgot a ton or will remember, as soon as I post this, something I JUST HAD to include and didn't, but that's the fun of these lists
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 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 (Sonnets, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, Twelfth Night, The Tempest)
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 - 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-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 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
I just went through and bolded the ones I've read. Saying I intend to read a book seems to doom it to a literary purgatory.
I must say, if you've grown up under a predominantly white, Judeo-Christian culture, it is indeed troubling if you've only read 6 of these. However, I find it a bit disingenuous to condemn someone who's perhaps read 6 very, very good and well-crafted books on this list next to, say, someone who's read twice as many on the list - but only the light fiction. I'll defend Stephen King's literary prowess as the day is long, but damned if I'll argue that whether or not someone's read Yann Martel or Dan Brown makes for a literary mind. The former is a plagiarist, and the latter never met an ellipses he didn't like. For that matter, does it make me more literary that, of the French literature on the list, I've read most of them in French and not in English at all?
Consider the merits and lack thereof of basing a worthwhile literature list on popularity as opposed to the critical thinking involved in reading or just absorbing text. People fucking heat their homes with remaindered copies of Bridget Jones' Diary. While this list, as it was constructed, does indicate... something about our literary values, this includes the bad as well as the good.
This is a list of the 100 most worthwhile books you absolutely, positively must read. Some of these books are quite distasteful to read, but are nonetheless important. Some of these books may not appear on the surface to be philosophical or incredibly deep, but have moved people nonetheless. I haven't read all of these necessarily, but I have read the vast majority. Like any such list, this is entirely subjective - and the fun comes in debating the results!
1. Bold the ones you've read.
2. Of the ones you have not read, substitute five of them with books you feel need to be included.
3. Pass it on!
My list:
1. The Giver by Lois Lowry
2. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
3. The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
4. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare
5. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
6. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
8. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
10. The Bible, any translation
11. Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb
12. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
13. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
14. A Raisin in the Sun by Lorraine Hansberry
15. Cane by Jean Toomer
16. So Far from God by Ana Castillo
17. The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros
18. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
19. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
20. Yama by Alexandre Kuprin
21. The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
22. Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes
23. Family Ties by Clarice Lispector
24. The Cat in the Hat by Dr. Seuss
25. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
26. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
27. Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
28. Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
29. Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga
30. Barefoot Gen series by Keiji Nakazawa
31. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
32. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
33. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
34. The Woman Who Owned The Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen
35. Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison
36. Cruddy by Lynda Barry
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. The Qur'an
39. The Niebelungenlied
40. The Stranger by Albert Camus
41. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
42. The Shining by Stephen King
43. Weep Not, Child by Ngugi wa Thiong'o
44. Woman at Point Zero by Nawal el Saadawi
45. From Hell by Alan Moore
46. The Sandman Series by Neil Gaiman
47. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
48. Kehinde by Buchi Emecheta
49. Naked by David Sedaris
50. This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua
51. Sus Majores Poemas by Ruben Dario
52. The poetry of Pablo Neruda
53. The Devil Wears Prada by Lauren Weisberger
54. Bitter Grounds by Sandra Benitez
55. Einstein's Dreams by Alan Lightman
56. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
57. The Thurber Carnival by James Thurber
58. Native Son by Richard Wright
59. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
60. Lysistrata by Aristophanes
61. Medea by Euripedes
62. Oedipus Cycle by Sophocles
63. Poems by Sappho
64. The Aeneid by Vergil
65. Paradise Lost by John Milton
66. The Heptameron by Marguerite de Navarre
67. Tartuffe by Moliere
68. Middlemarch by George Eliot
69. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
70. Death in Venice by Thomas Mann
71. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
72. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
73. 1984 by George Orwell
74. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
75. Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo
76. Harry Potter series by J. K. rowling
77. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
78. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
79. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
80. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
81. The Hours by Michael Cunningham
82. The Vagina Monologues by Eve Ensler
83. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
84. Tepper Isn't Going Out by Calvin Trillin
85. Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters
86. The works of Rainer Maria Rilke
87. Upanishads
88. Candide by Voltaire
89. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
90. Vilette by Charlotte Bronte
91. Stories by Saki
92. A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket
93. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
94. Dangerous Liaisons by Choderlos de Laclos
95. The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen by Alan Moore
96. The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
97. The Giver by Lois Lowry
98. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
99. Invisible Man by Harlan Ellison
100. The Time Machine by H.G. Wells
I'm sure I forgot a ton or will remember, as soon as I post this, something I JUST HAD to include and didn't, but that's the fun of these lists
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