Wednesday 15 December 2010

Smile like you meme it.


Books! Books! Books!

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read an excerpt. Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses.

[Actually, I looked this up and it is totally an urban legend. The BBC does not actually believe you are this illiterate. However, somebody does, so here it is.]

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 Faulk
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
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
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 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 Kerouak
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 Inferno - Dante
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 - 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 [technically this is included in The Complete Works of. WAY TO GO FAKE BBC.]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

*****

15 Authors

The Rules: Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who've influenced you and that will always stick with you. List the first fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes. Tag at least fifteen friends, including me, because I'm interested in seeing what authors my friends choose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste rules in a new note, cast your fifteen picks, and tag people in the note.)

1. F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. Evelyn Waugh
3. Charles Dickens
4. Richard Wilbur
5. Dr. Seuss
6. JK Rowling
7. Vladimir Nabakov
8. Jane Austen
9. John Donne
10. JD Salinger
11. Kazuo Ishiguro
12. Chuck Klosterman
13. Kurt Vonnegut
14. Edith Wharton
15. Kevin Fanning

16 comments:

Jennie said...

I always thought that six book thing sounded off. I mean, who hasn't read at least, like, ten of those books?

S said...

My list is pathetic. I have only read 14 of these, and of those 14, several I read as a child. There are about 8 more that I've started, but not finished, and about 2 more that I think I read when I was younger, but can't recall 100% to know for sure. Plus, I probably have about 60 of these books on my shelf right now. Guess I'll just have to quit my job and start reading for a while.

me said...

I highly recommend reading count of monte cristo..or anything by Alexander Dumas. One of my favorite authors, and definitely one of my favorite books!

(and I'd be bad if I didnt also include the Bible. )

Ashley said...

I think you guys might be in denial about the true stupidity of the world. People are super illiterate. I think we're a pretty biased sample to test this out on.

Unknown said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Unknown said...

I think Ashley is correct. My circle of friends is not very well read, myself included. However, after discovering this blog you are all making me want to read, read, read. I’ve got my book list going. Thanks….

eclectic said...

I want a list of books or authors you would un-read if you could. The only thing of Nabokov I've ever read is Lolita, and I gotta tell ya, it's about the creepiest, most depressing book ever, and I'd un-read it in a heartbeat if I could.

kat said...

Well, to be fair, Lolita is creepy on purpose. Try Pale Fire. It RULES.

(I would un-read anything by the Brontes. I friggin' HATE their stupid books.)

eclectic said...

Oooh, good call. Reading Wuthering Heights was like being punished for no good raisin.

Unknown said...

Yeesh. I've only read 19 of those books. I feel so inadequate. For what it's worth, you should run, not walk, to the nearest used book store, buy A Prayer For Owen Meany, then not sleep until you finish it. Such is its goodness.

When you say 'Notes', are you talking about greader? How would I only tag certain people? Technology scares me, y'know.

kat said...

oh, sorry, i should have explained. i was tagged for these memes in facebook, like, eons ago and figured this was as good a time as any to get around to them.

Heather Anne Hogan said...

Wuthering Heights is just ... so unnecessarily confusing. Like, who is narrating this goddamn thing, you know?

Kiti said...

I did the book list meme, but not the 15 authors.
http://classickiti.blogspot.com/2010/12/bookish-meme.html

If I could choose to unread anything on this list, it would be Lord of the Flies.

If I would seek to read a few more items on this list, what should they be? I might try to finish some that I've started. But not Anna Karenina--that's just never going to happen.

me said...

I would also undo Lord of the Flies..but mostly because my high school teacher focused on it for pretty much the whole year.

And I liked a lot Wuthering Heights. Worst Grammar. I know.

sarahg

april said...

Man, the His Dark Materials trilogy had such great potential and went downhill so fast no one could stop it. The last book was almost painful for me. Not to mention, I was so disappointed that I couldn't see MY daemon. (Although, I'm pretty sure it's a dog.)

kat said...

april, yes! the last one was so bad i seriously wanted to light it on fire.