Thanks to HP, I feel a little less read than I did yesterday. LOL. Apparently it was World Book Day recently and I missed it. I hate it when that happens! And in honor of the event, a list was made of the Top 100 Books You Can’t Live Without, which has now been turned into an instant blogosphere meme. 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 Blogger won't let me underline (easily), I've used an asterisk)
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs
I’ve read 41 out of the 100, but only a handful get my asterisk. For an old English major, you’d think I would have read them all. But I really have to wonder how they came up with these titles. I mean, Bridget Jones’ Diary? Okay, I showed you mine, now show me yours!
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 Faulks
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 (just cuz everyone should....)
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 (another must read for all)
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*
Wednesday, July 2, 2008
A Top 100 Meme
Posted by Jennifer at 11:27 AM
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5 comments:
Interesting how this list feels so 'elitist' to me.
Some of these books are old friends, read and re-read and some nearly memorized. Some books I've barely heard of.
Interesting also how some entire genres don't even make this list. Notably comedy. Humor is such an integral part of the human experience, but the list seemed lacking any real humorists.
A dry bunch? or do we not value humor as much as we should?
CV, this list originated in the UK.....nuff said! I found this interesting little commentary about it:
http://www.terrypratchettbooks.org/discworld/non-pratchett-book-discussions/1371-top-100-books-you-cant-live-without.html
I think you might really like Pullman's His Dark Materials. It's a scathing critique of religion which I thoroughly enjoyed.
I actually posted mine...so check it out. Very interesting to see what everyone has read and not read. Also I kind of made it my goal when I got back to the states 3 years ago to make myself read better books and actually got really hooked on the classics. Now I have a great list I can stick to and maybe find some good reads.
Lord of the Flies was required reading in my high school. Also Animal Farm. And "The Yearling".
I do have to admit to having covered most of them at one time or another. I particularly liked Dune, until I read "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom", which was sort of the same but for real.
Books I would add....would include
Lord Kenneth Clarke's "Civilization"
Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon" (and almost anything else by Verne...grin!)
The Mabinogion
T.H. White's "The once and future King"
"Alice In Wonderland".
"Peter Pan"
"Animal Farm"
"Mein Kampf"
The Arabian Nights, (Husein Hadawwy's translation...Burton's is so Victorian)
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