Notable Books meme

[azurelunatic]

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.

[Edit: The list is from a reader survey as reported here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/6405737.stm]


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 -hey. this is a subset of #33.
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 - I probably read the whole thing, but it was 8th grade and there was a massive depression at that time.
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 - I only finished this because I liked Cassie's parody so much.
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 - again with the this-item-appears-within-another!
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So, er, I've read a few of these!

Comments

Really low bar

[frith]

I've read at least 24 of those books completely, easily 10 of them before I was 16 -- these are classics! Either the BBC thinks we're all illiterate idiots or their claim was made in order to boost our egos.

Re: Really low bar

[azurelunatic]

I think being internet people automatically raises the bar, and I think they were considering non-internet people too. If I had to look at my high school classmates and compare their reading habits to this list, I'm not sure that some of them would have even completely read the stuff we'd been assigned as part of class. I have memories of mixed fondness of being one of the three who did and thoroughly understood the day's Shakespeare reading, and holding mini-lectures on it before class started so the rest of the class understood it too.

Re: Really low bar

[frith]

Ach. Yes, you are probably right. And my idea of a good time was scoring a new author at the library. 8^B

Re: Really low bar

[azurelunatic]

And I had no TV at home, so if I wanted prepackaged entertainment, books were it. And I loved reading, and I was reading well above my grade level for entertainment. (Feynman's autobiographies are not light entertainment for the normal child in the 2nd grade or so.)

Re: Really low bar

[frith]

The parallels continue. 8^) While I did have a tiny black and white TV, my watching it was _not_ appreciated. I recall that at some point my mother expressed surprise that I could read and understand the vernacular in Huckleberry Finn...

[sporky_rat]

I've read 40 of them. I don't remember if I actually got all the way through Anna Karenina, so I didn't include it. I had some very serious English teachers who didn't care that I wanted to nap in class, I was going to learn something. Even if it was all about English rabbits.

I really need to write them a thank you note for that.

[azurelunatic]

Surprisingly few of these were forced upon me by teachers. I voluntarily checked out The Handmaid's Tale for pleasure reading. And Mama would get us books and I would dutifully read them and generally enjoy them.

Part of my thing was not realizing that you could quit reading a book if you didn't like it. I tried to finish every book I started. This didn't always work well.

[jeshyr]

Seven is above average!?

Somehow I already knew none of us were average, but that's .... quite scary.

I think the list is pretty crap in places too, BTW. "The Five People You Meet In Heaven" is not supposed to be very good, and I have read "Tuesdays With Morrie" which was the first one he wrote and apparently contains very similar ideas.

Anyway, I think I got about 37 of these read completely or nearly-completely. I only read Anna Karenina because I was in year 11 and determined to read Something Important - it was boring as all get-out. I do not like the Austen-esque books either but had to read several for English class.

Probably another 5-10 I've read part of the collection (eg Shakespeare) or part of the book and gave it up because I hated it. I am not a completeist when it comes to books!

[azurelunatic]

A couple of them (the 5 people, the Dan Brown one, Life of Pi) I read as part of a book club; apparently they were fantastically popular a couple years back. I was unimpressed with the 5 people, the Da Vinci Code intrigued me but I'd read Neal Stephenson first, and he does better intellectual/historical thrillers than Dan Brown, and I felt cheated by the ending of The Life of Pi.

[pauamma]

Is the main (POV) character in Life of Pi named after a swimming pool?

[azurelunatic]

I believe so.


It's a problem with unreliable narrators: how much is too unreliable?

[yvi]

Seven is above average!?

If it helps, that book list is from a survey of 2,000 people and nowhere have I been able to find a source for that "7 is above average" claim. The original story on bbc.co.uk

As for myself, I have only read about 10. I refuse to feel bad about that.

[sporky_rat]

And you shouldn't feel bad about it. You've probably read far better stuff than some of what's on that list.

[yvi]

Apart from the German classics I was forced to read at school, probably not much. I just don't care for reading (especially 'high-quality' books) that much. *shrugs*

[azurelunatic]

Edited, thanks.

Snared!

[frith]

This meme is even older and more sinister than you thought! I went to the link you provided and no 100 book list could I find, just a top ten. So I started digging. In my Google results I saw memes with the list and claim that Average Joe has only read _six_ of them. There was a top 100 BBC list ("The Big Read") from 2003, but it's not this list and it doesn't make claims as to how many people have read 'X number' of the books. And then I found this blog post debunking the BBC meme.

Re: Snared!

[yvi]

This meme is even older and more sinister than you thought! I went to the link you provided and no 100 book list could I find, just a top ten.

Well, actually, I was able to find it by searching for "World Book Day survey 100 2007" here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news

But that blog post is indeed very interesting.

Re: Snared!

[frith]

Good sleuthing! The lists match, except for item 76 (in The Guardian it's The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath).

[jeshyr]

Yvi, I agree 100% that the number of British-canon books read (or ANY books read) is not a measure of one's worth in any way shape or form. Living in a family with four severely dyslexic people, most of whom have not ever read an on-paper book for enjoyment I should know this better. I didn't even think of it when I was filling out the meme, and I wish I'd done better.

Also, thanks for the citation, BTW. It's good to know facts - they so often get distorted when memes circulate. Some further searching (you inspired me!) turned up this fairly interesting article about the origins of the meme: http://www.purplecar.net/2009/03/how-do-memes-start-a-case-study-100-books-in-facebook/ There's more information in the comments which is interesting too, including BBC references about how often people lie about books they've read because they're ashamed/guilty/want to seem smarter.

I will think more next time I see one of these, or something else like it.

[jeshyr]

oops, looks like I missed a bunch of comment notifications and have doubled up on what others have said. The intent still stands.

r

[pauamma]

4 Harry Potter Series- J.K. Rowling
8 Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
29 Alice in Wonderland-Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
51 Life of Pi-Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
85 Madam Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

(You should read A Confederacy of Dunces)

[hanelissar.livejournal.com]

Looks pretty good to me! Although I have seen this meme around and do wonder, what with the mistakes, whether it's *actually* from the BBC. Then again, maybe I'm putting too much faith in my media providers...

Now you've made me curious as to how I'd do!

[azurelunatic]

I'm sure that part of it is due to playing Telephone.

[xinef.livejournal.com]

For what it's worth, my count is 35 read.

[trolleypup.livejournal.com]

At least 24.