in which i am literate and slightly above average [la

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 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
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare most of them but not the entire body of work
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
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
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

what an odd list....i wonder what made them choose these particular ones* and why, for instance, hamlet is broken out of shakespeare's work as is the lion, the witch, and the wardrobe from the chronicles of narnia? clearly, i love dickens and austen--i'm more of an anglophile than a francophile when it comes to lit even though i'm a big lover of france and most things french. i read most of the dickens oeuvre when i was living in france and looking for english-language books. dickens was the best because it was always the longest. hmmm apparently i don't love the bible though. too much hyperbole and way too many begats for my taste. and honestly, mitch albom? come on, people, surely there's something as popular but better than that? has anyone read the bfg by roald dahl? that's one of my favorites as well. and it looks like i need to attempt the russians. sigh.

*eta: must be a publishing thing. as i re-read the directions to the meme that's what my large brain is telling me.

One of these days I am going to start a meme that is titled something along the lines of 'Books I Have Bought because I Feel That I Should Own Them, But that I have not necessarily read yet.' That would encompass some of this list, except for all of the Austen books, which not only have I bought, read, and loved, but have, in some cases (Persuasion and Pride & Prejudice), bought multiple copies, due to extreme wear and tear.

I worry about the people who have only read six of the books on this list.

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yes do that. it'll be funny to go through my booksheleves and see what i own but haven't ever got to, while still adding new books to the collection.

speaking of reading, have you seen the bbc robin hood (super fun; great cast; more modern)? i ask because dollsome and someone else have been working on a humongous novel they call the romcom which is an rpf starring lucy griffiths (marian) and richard armitage (guy of gisbourne) from the show. i just joined the group and am looking forward to seeing if it's any good.

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I confess that I read the Mitch Albom one. I know most of his books are sap, but I admit that that one did get to me. I cried. Sigh.

Well, I did it on my lj and found that I'd read 36 out of 100. Not great, but hey it makes me six times better than the average adult at book-reading right?

yes you're definitely above average...6x in fact! that's pretty good. and once you reach the venerable age of nearly 40 like me (sigh), you'll have lots more books read, too!

and hey there's nothing wrong with a little genuine emotion re: albom. just cause it's not my cuppa, doesn't make it bad.

I'm not far off from 40. I turn 36 this year. Ooh, 36!!!

oh well you've got some reading to do! no more excuses, old lady!! hee hee. ah me. your birthday's in august, right? i'm september. you'll have to tell me what you think of 36. it was a hard birthday for me. but i seem to be kind of excited in an ambivalent way for 40. i'm already planning my party. well at least i'm beginning to think about what i'd like to do the most.....it's challenging since part of me wants to just hang out with enzo who's 2 and part of me wants to have a sophistcated cocktail party...we'll see what happens.

We have so many book-loves in common. *feels oddly proud* And, in scrolling through the comments, you should SO watch Robin Hood. I'm a big Robin/Marian shipper, and even if we don't ship the same way, it's still kinda tongue-in-cheek-y and full of action and delightful.

oh i totally watched robin hood! it was super fun and i enjoyed it immensely. i'm looking forward to the 2nd season. my ships on it are robin/marian, robin/djaq, marian/guy, guy/sheriff, oh! and alan/djaq! i like that way better than will/djaq. i'm an equal opportunity shipper apparently *giggle*

and it's totally cool that we have many book loves in common....yet another reason to be friends!

la_tante

in which i am literate and slightly above average

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