Friday, July 4, 2008

Books

Shannon posted this list and I thought it would be fun to do to.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.Look at the list and bold those you have read.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austin- listened to on audiotape at the PO, and have seen the play, many times
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein- at least the first one- I was under 10
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte- listened to on audiotape at the PO
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling- um no. not ever
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - New Testament - most of it
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell loved it
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott- I cry every time
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare all the major plays and some of the sonnets
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier- I picked this up when I was young (for obvious reasons) but really liked it.
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien- when I was young
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger- hated it!
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- wanted to, but it wasn't available on audiotape
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams- LOVE THEM!
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 read and audiotaped
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen- audiobook (aren't they wonderful?)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen- I don't remember. I did go through a jane austen kick
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- I looked through it at my mom's house and decided it wasnt for me
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown 3 or 4 times
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 only because I had to
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 audio book
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens- read and audiobook
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- I never had to read this. It was the "general" english class book, not the honors that I was in
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- another one I wanted to "read" but wasnt available on audiobook
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens- audio book
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker I went through a dracula/ vampire stage
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce- after A portrait of the artist as a young man, there was no WAY I was going to read any more joyce!
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath- I hated this. probably because I had one friend who really was depressed and suicidal and another who pretended to be while I was reading this.
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- awful awful book!
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert- so sad
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 -audiobook
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad- we had to read not one but two conrad pieces! UGH!
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery- in english and french and I've seen the play.
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

31 out of 100. Not too bad. Of course, even if I started on this list, the list would change before I finished. Oh well. I was a TA in high school for my english teacher, and I worked in the book storage area. So I read a lot of books that I wouldn't have otherwise read. She would loan them to me over the weekend. Also, I only used free audiobooks (that I downloaded while at work) while I worked at the post office, so they were in the public domain and more of the "classics".

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Some of these books (like Winnie the Pooh) were read to you when you were very very young; some you saw as TV shows (The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe); others are here if you ever want to borrow them. Sorry, I only have paper copies - not audio versions!

Shannon said...

That's awesome that you got to "read"/listen to so many books at the post office.

Ginny said...

I can do a little better than six, but it looks like I need to brush up on my classics. I try to alternate between my guilty pleasure (science fiction/fantasy) and classic literature.