Thursday, August 14, 2008

BBC's Big Read meme




I found this meme on Jams O'Donnell's The Poor Mouth. I thought I'd give it a try.

The Big Read ( apparently sponsored by the BBC) reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.

2) Italicize those you intend to read.

3) Underline the books you love.


4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated. (I see no reason to restrict ‘books I hated’ to school - there are only a couple of books on the list I really disliked, and neither of them was a school text.)

5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them. Ha!

6) I have left the ones I've never heard of in normal type. There are a lot of them. There are also a lot of children's books most of which I have never read. And who in heck is Terry Pratchett?

THE LIST

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
23. Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
24. Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
25. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
26. Tess Of The D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
27. Middlemarch, George Eliot
28. A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
29. The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck
30. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
31. The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
32. One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
33. The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
34. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
35. Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
36. Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
37. A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
38. Persuasion, Jane Austen
39. Dune, Frank Herbert
40. Emma, Jane Austen
41. Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
42. Watership Down, Richard Adams
43. The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
44. The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
45. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
46. Animal Farm, George Orwell
47. A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
48. Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
49. Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
50. The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
51. The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
52. Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck
53. The Stand, Stephen King (I have read all of King's early novels and loved them!)
54. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
55. A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (But I read an Equal Music)
56. The BFG, Roald Dahl
57. Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
58. Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
59. Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
60. Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
61. Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
62. Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden (Didn't like it much!)
63. A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
64. The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
65. Mort, Terry Pratchett
66. The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
67. The Magus, John Fowles (But I read The French Lieutenant's Woman)
68. Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
69. Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
70. Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
71. Perfume, Patrick Süskind
72. The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
73. >Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
74. Matilda, Roald Dahl
75. Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
76. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
77. The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
78. Ulysses, James Joyce
79. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
80. Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
81. The Twits, Roald Dahl
82. I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
83. Holes, Louis Sachar
84. Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
85. The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
86. Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
87. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
88. Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
89. Magician, Raymond E Feist
90. On The Road, Jack Kerouac
91. The Godfather, Mario Puzo
92. The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
93. The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
94. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
95. Katherine, Anya Seton
96. Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
97. Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel García Márquez
98. Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
99. The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
100. Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie

If you want to do this meme here is the list clean of any markings so you can paste it to your blog and begin!

This meme is time consuming but a lot of fun! If you are a reader I think you'll want to do it! :)

I have a list of the 100 Best Books compiled by the Modern Library (U.S.) in 1998. The list is a little different. I will do this meme using the Modern Library list soon.

theteach

8 comments:

Putz said...

i have read only eighteen of the hundred you listed, maybe that is why i'm such a bad speller...teach, you have some very interesting stuff, i have to concentrate and spend more time on your blog and less time on someone elses blog

Banba said...

I've read 45. Does that make me literate? Just kidding! I was a teacher for 20 years, The last 8 of which I was an elementary school librarian.

Durward Discussion said...

I'll do it, but you must must must read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It is British humor at its silliest and how can you go through life without knowing that the answer to everything is 42 and why you need a towel, a babblefish, and book that reads: Don't Panic!

The Mumma said...

Who is Terry Pratchett??? You've got to be kidding me! I personally love his young adult novels. The Tiffany Aching/Wee Free Men series is excellent. We have a children's book of his that we read to Elijah. It's called "Where's My Cow?" and is a story within a story.

I've read 29 of the 100. Funnily enough, most of the ones I've read have been the children's books. Quite a lot on the list I own but haven't read yet (some of the Pratchetts and Hitchhiker's Guide fit here) and others I have started but didn't finish by the time I had to give them back to their rightful owners. A couple I couldn't remember if I had read them or not (Winnie the Pooh, the Dickens books) because I wasn't sure if I'd read the abridged versions or not or if I'd read the whole book.

jmb said...

I managed 46 but then I have been around a lot longer than most of you.
I will never read Harry Potter and don't do SF or Fantasy.

Colin Campbell said...

I have read about 15, but I am open to reading more if I ever get some time. Most of my time that I could be reading books is spent blogging. I doubt if a list of the 100 top blogs will have the same kudos. Interesting list.

Travis Cody said...

I did this over at Jamie's and found 22 on the list that I have read.

SandyCarlson said...

Cool one, Mary. I'll have to try it. We have the Big Read in this country to encourage reading. This is good.