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 on your own blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
WATCHING MOVIES DOES NOT COUNT!!!
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Soon... very soon. Too soon. Before April is up. Whatever you do, don't take 'Revolution to Revolution: British Literature 1640 - 1780' courses.)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (it took me an eternity to finish too. I read the first few chapters a couple of times, gave up and watched the movies. Picked the books up again and this time finished all three.)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird (because it;s one of those books you just have to read)
6 The Bible (well, sort of... it was a children's bible)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I stopped reading after Heathcliff or Cathy or someone else wandered over green meadows for the 564th time)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (again, this is one of those books you just have to read, but 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 (I'm not quite THAT mad, but I've read a fair amount.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (it's entertaining, but the later chapters are boring
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I am man enough to admit that I read AND kind of liked it.)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (I don't even know why. I'd probably hate it)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I started it too. It's the most confusing thing I've ever come across)
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 (John Steinbeck is great)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (of course! Through the Looking Glass too)
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 (I've seen the movie, I've read A Thousand Splendid Suns... now I've to read this one too)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (so what?)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (don't like him at all, or Piglet for that matter. I only like Tigger and Eeyore)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I am going to read this if it kills me)
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 (yeah... no. Actually, hang on a minute... do we have to read Pride and Prejudice or Sense and Sensibility?)
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 (I think this may be the most disappointing read I've ever had)
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 (I was on a holiday with my family and had finished my own books, so I had no choice but to turn to my sister's...)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (long long long ago)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (don't remember a thing, but it was disappointing too)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie (one of my favourite books. I read it last year)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (I read the first few chapters)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (alright, I'm still reading it, but how many people out there can truthfully claim to have read one third of it and survived? There you go. And I will read the rest too. Just give me another year.)
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 (about 50 times writing an essay last year)
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 (some of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (about 50 times writing an essay last year)
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 (sounds nice. And I was wondering why his name sounds so familiar... turns out he wrote On The Beach, which I liked very much)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
30. Not bad! And I tag the Bespectactled One for obvious reasons.
