I saw this over on Busted’s blog and thought I’d take a shot at it.
Here’s how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE – mine are in red
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them 😉
The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien ~ I keep trying to read this one, but I never make it past Crickhollow before I get bored.
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 ~ I tried to read this when I was 7 or 8 but I never really got into it. I doubt I made it past the first 20 pages.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy ~This was a favorite for years. I may have to go reread it now.
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare ~ The Complete Works? No. I have read a lot of them though.
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 ~But I did read The Mill on the Floss.
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 – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis ~ I’m not sure why this is separate from #33.
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres ~ Don’t bother with the movie. Honestly, does Nicholas Cage have the ability to express any emotion?
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden ~ After reading this, I strongly recommend reading Geisha: A Life by Mineko Iwasaki. She wrote her autobiography after being disappointed by the way Golden misrepresented aspects of the Geisha.
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 Meany – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery ~ I read so fast and so much when I was a kid, I tended to pick really long series.
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 ~Shannon loves Dune. I think it’s incredibly dull.
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 ~can I have extra credit for also having read Billy Bud and Bartleby the Scrivener?
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 ~but I did read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Dubliners
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 ~This is one of my favorite movies. You know the one you HAVE to watch if it’s being shown on cable?
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
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 ~ I read this in the sixth grade because I’d heard that it contained the longest sentence published. I TOLD you I’m a book geek!
How ’bout you?
Wow…I haven’t thought about Bartleby the Scrivener in a long time…
Brideshead Revisited is probably my favourite ever book. Read it. Love it.
Well I’m not to shabby 27% of the list is on my ‘read’ list! Though I’m kind of confused as to why a lot haven’t read these books. I’d say about half of them were on my high school or college curriculum reading lists. *shrug*
Did it: http://twinkies.bastetweb.com/2008/07/25/book-meme/