The OF Blog: Big Read 100 book list meme

Thursday, July 03, 2008

Big Read 100 book list meme

I think I read over this one, but didn't post it before. Never quite bothered to figure out the underline bit, so let's just say there's a lot of books that I enjoyed quite a bit among the read list.

Instructions:
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 in your own so we can try and track down these people who've read six and force books upon them.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
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'Urbervilles– Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – J.D. 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 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 – C.S. Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. 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 – A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – L.M. 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 Zafón
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 – A.S. 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 – E.B. 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

71 books read on this list. Not bad, even if I'm dismayed at the paucity of Hemingway, Dos Passos, and quite a few others from the Lost Generation here.

26 comments:

Chris, The Book Swede said...

Nice list :) I'm pleasantly surprised -- I've read twelve on that list, and I'm aware (and thus planning to read) the rest on that list.

I hold in my hand a copy of Pride & Prejudice...

~Chris

Anonymous said...

None of them underlined? Where's the love, dude?! ;)

Larry Nolen said...

As I said in my intro, Laurens, I didn't see a fancy "underline" icon on my screen and decided to be lazy and just bold, since most of the ones on that list I enjoyed reading :P

Chris, that particular Austen is pretty good, even if I prefer her last couple of novels ;)

Anonymous said...

Mea Culpa, I should read not skim intros. :P

Fair enough, but the problem with a list such this one is that it's just too big. Id est, one needs specific pointers and that's where the underlined books come into play.

Gabriele Campbell said...

Underline is easy: same as b-old and i-talics, only with an u. :)

Larry Nolen said...

I'm not going to handcode over 50 of those titles, so you'll just have to guess which 50+ out of 71 I loved! :P

I'm tempted to come up with a list of my own. One that would be at least twice the size of this one and incorporate so many other styles/centuries of writers. But that might be meme overload ;)

Anonymous said...

I think it would be, since we have Jeff Vandermeer's Big Ass Fantasy list to refer to (he recently brought it back to attention). Pretty big range of style and themes on that list, I'd say. Then again, his list did not include many "mainstream" literature classics, like this one does.

Larry Nolen said...

Exactly. And I'm more well-read still in non-genre literature than I am in the various genre styles, plus I read quite a bit in Spanish, so what do you think my list would be like?

One hint: Borges near the top, if not the top.

Fish Monkey said...

You have me slightly beat: http://squirrel-monkey.livejournal.com/97081.html

Larry Nolen said...

Impressive, Kathy. I haven't seen any past mine, have you? It certainly is, as you say on your LJ, a list that exposes reading gaps as much as anything else.

Gabriele Campbell said...

Yep, Borges is only one of the authors sadly missing on that list. I played along as well. :)

Btw, I have a nice little HTML editor in which I write my posts, and that one offers shortcuts for some basic code. :)

Larry Nolen said...

Ah, but that's cheating, Gabriele! No fair! :P

Anne S said...

I've read most of them (76) and have a few that I haven't read on my bookshelf. Some I would not bother to read eg. The Da Vinci Code and the Faraway Tree books.

Larry Nolen said...

True, there were a few questionable choices, especially those two you mentioned. As I said above, I'm contemplating writing my own list, just to see the reactions to it :P

Stefanie said...

Why does the list include
"14 Complete Works of Shakespeare"
as well as
"98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare" ?

Isn't Hamlet a work of Shakespeare? Or am I outing myself as a Shakespeare-n00b?

32/100... OK, not too bad, considering that some of those are English classics and that I'm not a native speaker.

Larry Nolen said...

No clue, Stephanie. I would guess the list compiler didn't proof his/her work too well.

Mihai A. said...

Same with C.S. Lewis. The list has "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" too. Just weird :)

Larry Nolen said...

Yeah, I noticed that when I was reading the list. Things like that just tempt me to be snarky with a list of my own, though ;)

Anonymous said...

46 out of 100. Not bad, although I've read some of them in translation when I was younger.
I am big Austen fan, and must admit I'm a bit disappointed about the omission of "Mansfield Park", which IMO is one of her most profound works.

I wanted to see Charlotte Brönte's "Villette" on this list. It is her masterpiece. She was definitely the better author of the sisters. (I was seriously disappointed with "Wuthering Heights"!).

I highly recommend both Byatt's "Possession" and McEwan's "Atonement" (one of my best reading experiences last year).

"Memoirs of a Geshia" is surprisingly good (don't bother with the film).

Anonymous said...

I was looking over this list again, when a thought occurred to me. Isn't On The Beach Nevil Shute's most famous work?

Robert said...

Intriguing list. Haven't read a lot of them unfortunately...

Hope you have a great 4th Larry!

Anonymous said...

It would be easier for me to list the ones I HATED.

Am I the only person in the world who thought The Kite Runner was the most predictable, cheesiest thing I've ever read?

HATED The Wasp Factory. Loved Matter, though...

Most of the classics you listed I read as a teen ( maybe 45 years ago). Loved Wuthering Heights.

Some of your titles are such dismal stories.

Anonymous said...

Why don't you want to read Watership Down? Do you have anything against rabbits? :)

Larry Nolen said...

Anon #1: This is my copy from elsewhere. My own list would differ in some regards.

Anon #2: I eventually will read it, but unsure when. Oversight on the italicizing there.

Lawrence: Yes, On the Beach is Shute's most famous work.

Trinuviel: I'll look into those in the near future.

Anonymous said...

I agree wholeheartedly with you about Borges, Larry. I just put my meme list on my blog:

http://verbeat.org/blogs/pwt/2008/07/big-read-100-book-list-meme.html

Larry Nolen said...

Just saw that one, Fábio, before checking out the comments here. Curious to know what you'll make of the one I created, since it doesn't have a "ranking" as much as a grouping to it.

 
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