The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the website, its purpose is to "restore reading to the center of American culture." They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.
For fun, let's see how many of the top 100 books we've actually read. My list is below. How well did you do? Have you read more than 6?
Here's what you do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE. [Since I can't figured out how to underline using Blogger, I've put these books in square brackets.]
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.
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 (parts of it count, right?)
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 (I read most of these in my college Shakespeare class, so I'm counting it.)
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 (seen the movie)
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 (I've seen the movie...never read the book)
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 (seen the movie; have yet to finish the book)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (seen the movie and the musical...one of these days I'll read the book!)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (seen the movie)
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 (seen the movie and the musical)
Happily, I can say that I've read more than 6 of these books. But are there any I haven't read yet that you would highly recommend?
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
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9 comments:
OMG, you've got to read The Great Gatsby and Tess of the D'Urbervilles--two of my all-time favorites!
Another of these memes! I've read 42 of those books...am I cultured? :) I did a similar meme a few months ago, but I came out much better on this one.
Interesting how the NEA is pitching it as "the center of American culture" when only about 10 or 12 of the authors are American! Where are Thoreau and Emerson? Twain? Hawthorne? Arthur Miller? Amy Tan? Asimov and Bradbury? Edith Wharton? Where's Laura Ingalls Wilder, for that matter?
Possession is one of my favorite books of all time. It's a "Big Read" though. I also liked Joyce's Ulysses way back when in college, another tough slog. Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy is pretty good, much better than the movie!
I'm like you, I've seen lots of the movies, and I'm counting things like the Bible and Shakespeare (Why did they separate Hamlet out?) since I've read large chunks if not all.
PS: To underline, just go to the "Edit HTML" tab while creating your post, and put "u" and "/u" with angle brackets around your text.
43!
Well, I think you all did better than me! But I agree...there were not many classic American authors included in the list.
And thanks, Anthromama, for the hint on how to underline in Blogger! After I read it, I had a "duh" moment! I do know some basic HTML coding and could have easily figured that one out. Oh well!
I read 11 of the 100.
I read the The Time Traveler's Wife in three nights and messed up my sleep schedule. Plus a movie is being made-- read it before you find out who the actors are.
Hell, having been an English major, I’m shocked that I read only 1 of these. I’d also argue that Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and The Sun Also Rises should be on the list.
Seems to me if Scott Fitzgerald’s on the list, Hemingway surely should be. I don’t understand the almost total disdain with which Hemingway is regarded this day. I understand his “manly” subject may be overblown, but his spare, descriptive writing surely deserves some respect.
Speaking of Fitzgerald, I certainly agree with Lori Hand about Gatsby and Tess being must-reads, tho' I’d recommend Jude the Obscure before Tess. And here's something to consider: read Gatsby and then watch the Bob Dylan fictionalized bio pic I’m Not There. Then tell me whether reinventing oneself isn’t the real great American pasttime.
By the way, Krisan, I’m going to add you to my blogroll and I invite you to have a look-see at my blog.
Stephen, thanks for leaving your comment. I agree with you...Hemingway should be included in that list, as well.
I will have to read Gatsby sometime this summer. I've also been wanting to watch I'm Not There; so I'll have to wait on that one until I've finished Gatsby. I honestly don't know how I went through high school and college as an English major without reading it.
Thanks, also, for adding me to your blogroll! Your blog looks really interesting and I'll be sure to add you to mine today.
Where did this list come from? And what happened to #44 and #51?
I found this list on the Editorial Ass at http://editorialass.blogspot.com/2008/06/big-read-meme-ish.html
I didn't realize #44 and 51 were missing until now. Sorry about that, everyone!
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