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Mpls, MN, United States

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Thursday, February 19, 2009

Again With the Book List

Hathor and Chelfea have recently posted this meme, which is also making its rounds on Facebook and is similar to a list several of us did a while ago (of which I've since read 10 more). This one apparently is based on the BBC's Big Read's "search for the nation's best-loved novel."

My results, with ones I've read in bold and ones I want to in italics, plus asterisks for books I haven't read by authors I have:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (entire trilogy + The Hobbit)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (most of it)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (7-for-1!)
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 * (complete seems rather extreme...)
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
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens* (seriously, why all the 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 (see also No. 33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ('have somehow only read parts!)
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 (again, most of it...)
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 (own this one, but got too creeped out...)
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 Alb
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 (see also No. 14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

So... that's 42/100? But, seriously, all that Dickens and Austen--and, for that matter, Hardy--is killer. I know Heather might disagree with me on this one, but I think the best book (or maybe two) of each should suffice.

Also, I just noticed that the list I posted here is not at all the same list as the BBC one I linked to above. That one has, for example, far more Terry Pratchett (and fewer of Austen, Dickens, and Hardy! ). Maybe I'll work on that list later.

5 comments:

David said...

A quick scan over the list puts my count somewhere in the 20-25 region. I have some catching up to do.

Carissa said...

I had to read Dracula for a class in grad school and it was creepy. I decided to write my paper about how it exemplifies Stoker's feminist ideas; which lightened it up for me.

Ben said...

As I guessed....I'm not very well read. Only got 18 of the 100 completely. A few others, bits and pieces. I definitely think you should turn Grapes of Wrath to italics and then bold. It's my favorite Steinbeck. A bit hefty, yes, but worth it. For something much quicker, go with The Curious Incident.

Anonymous said...

Want to know a secret?
I love Thomas Hardy.

That being said, soon I'll fill out this list too.

The Thirsty Gargoyle said...

The list was drawn up, apparently, based on 2,000 online lists, each one featuring ten books that the polled people said they 'couldn't live without'. I think this explains its oddness.

Hello, by the way.