I've never done the book meme before...

[lizbee]

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:

How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]


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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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

That's 35 out of 100, which is okay, not brilliant. But filling in the gaps would take up valuable reading time that could be better spent reading Joan Aiken novels and Andrew Morton's biography of Tom Cruise.

Comments

[lilacsigil.livejournal.com]

I hope this isn't a list of good books, because Memoirs of a Geisha was terrible. Then again, so is Tess of the D'Urbevilles, and that's a "classic".

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

It can't be a list of good books, The Da Vinci Code is on there. (A book I found entertaining, but extremely trashy.)

[silly-cleo.livejournal.com]

*LMAO* My thoughts exactly. :D

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Then again, so is Tess of the D'Urbevilles

:(

*hugs copy with its beautiful expressive writing and sorrow close*

[owl]

I think it's a combination of classic and currently popular.

[hadria.livejournal.com]

I've only read 15 of them. that makes me sad. :( Though I seriously do know people who have read exactly 0 of these books, that makes me even sadder.

[settiai]

So, yes, I've read 76 of these books. I'm not sure whether to be ashamed to admit that I'm that much of a nerd or embarrassed that there are 24 of them that I haven't read.

[ladymako71.livejournal.com]

I've read 79 of them and I'm ambivalent of the whole thing. <=)

[privatemaladict.livejournal.com]

28 out of 100 for me. It's quite sad that some many people have managed so few of these books, since it's by no means a difficult list - lots of popular stuff on there.

[faith-less-one.livejournal.com]

Read 55 out of 100 (and I've started but not finished a further 20 or so).

I do kinda want to finish the whole list one day.

[marymac.livejournal.com]

Joan Aiken is better than a good ten or so of the books on that list. Some of them are pretty terrible. No amount of pressure is ever going to get me to finish any Mitch Albom book, for a start.

[pandarus.livejournal.com]

69, and I've got a couple sitting unread on my shelves, glowering every time I bring home some trashy SciFi flibbertigibbet and settle down for some quality time on the sofa with them instead.

Mostly very good books, although - why does 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe' merit inclusion individually, as well as part of the Narnia books? And ditto 'Hamlet'? Odd.

(And there are a couple of really crappy books on the list, imho. But mostly they're crackers.)

[owl]

Yes, I wondered that, too.

[silly-cleo.livejournal.com]

I like these lists, they're always good fodder for reading ideas. Not that I have any need of it right now, I've got the Scarlet Pimpernel and sequels to keep me entertained till the end of time, plus I have my very first Bujold sitting on my bedside table! :D

[lasultrix.livejournal.com]

Only read 6? I had to get down to 17 on the list before I found one I hadn't read at least some of!

I concur that most people are unlikely to have read the Bible in its entirety.

[--kali--.livejournal.com]

Do we count Harry Potter as one or 7 though? Same with the Chronicles of Narnia - that would get a lot of my friends up form 2 books to 14.

[geekturnedvamp.livejournal.com]

Okay, this list is weird. Aside from the redundancy, does reading Lord of the Rings include the appendices? Does the Bible include every single book of the Old and New Testaments? And as far as complete works of Shakespeare, I mean, I will freely admit that I wish I could go back and unread Titus Andronicus because there is a reason not to read some of these plays! But even if I only counted books I was sure I have read every word of, I'd still have read half this list. 6? That is just depressing!

[palmetto.livejournal.com]

I particularly like how it lists The Chronicles of Narnia and then specifically lists The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.

I've completed 17 of those...but really, Bridget Jones on a list like this? Yikes.

[ms-treesap.livejournal.com]

43! I'm ashamed to call myself a bookworm :(

[iko.livejournal.com]

The number of items I've read cover to cover: 35
The number of items I've started but didn't finish: 27 (at least)

There are a number of things that I haven't touched at all that I get the impression should be in my cultural vocabulary, like *Jane Eyre* and *To Kill a Mockingbird*. I own a copy of the latter too, I just never got around to reading it.

One of my plans this summer is to start going through my rather large book collection and get rid of the ones that I will never read/open again because they were crap and get cracking on the books I own but never really got into (like *Love in the Time of Cholera*).

[nonelvis]

43, though I don't remember whether I've read Notes From a Small Island, which would bring it up to 44.

I feel like it needs a corollary list of "books you read but wish you hadn't": The DaVinci Code, Madame Bovary (in French, though I doubt I would have liked it any better in English), Great Expectations.

[ghost2.livejournal.com]

I've finished 38 of them. Nevercould make it all the way through Catcher in the Rye, though. Good thing I was reading it on my own and not for school. OTOH, I did have to do Wuthering Heights for school, in three classes over the years. I hated it the first time I read it, but eventually it became one of my favorites.

[fyrdrakken]

37, plus at least one I started but didn't get through. And I can't remember if Notes from a Small Island is one of the Bill Bryson books I've read or not.

ETA: No, 36, because I haven't read "Hamlet" after all. I think.

[biichan.livejournal.com]

... I'm not actually sure of my score, because for some of these (like Little Women and the Bible) I read the abridged children's version as a wee little thing and haven't gotten around to finishing the original.

[rivrea.livejournal.com]

I think I read between 80 or 90 titles on that list, but as a literature major, I was the victim of quite a few reading lists. I'd willingly trade in my time with Ulysses for the collected children's novels of Joan Aiken.

[ladymako71.livejournal.com]

I'm probably twice that what you got...I just don't feel like bolding that much shite. <=)

ETA: After actually counting them, I've read 79 of those.

[clutzycricket.livejournal.com]

(Hi, found via your fic.)

I've finished 26, including the Bible, to my chagrin. (I was really, really bored. I also went through a book on herbal medicine.)

[melengro.livejournal.com]

I've read 53.

...wait, why are The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe listed separately? I call shenanigans. By which I mean shoddy fact-checking...

[aceofannwn.livejournal.com]

*sniff* well, I've only read 24 on that list (skimming them doesn't count, right?) but lots of them I don't have interest in. Whereas I've read a fair number of classics not on this list, like Captains Courageous, and Tom Sawyer... when I was a kid my mum (a former English teacher) utterly disapproved of the rubbish they had for girls my age and used to get me the classics, and it stuck.
Besides, I think some of these shouldn't be on the classics list...

[melwil.livejournal.com]

I got 30, but I'm halfway through 2 more (Lord of the Rings for me and The Hobbit with the kids)