the big book meme

Matthew and I are going to a costume party tonight, so I ought to be getting ready. Which, of course, is why Pymette's book meme is such a good idea! I do love me a good meme. This one is origianlly from the Big Read. Apparently they reckon most people will have only read 6 of the 100, which I think is astonishing.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

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 (erm, I've read bits of it…)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Hate, hate, hate this book, it drives me mad. They all deserve each other.)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (the book that got me started on this literature lark in the first place)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all of them, by any means. Doesn't that take years?)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (LOVE!)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger (Another classic one is supposed to love but I detest.)
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
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I've read about half, but I don't think that counts.)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (I feel like I have but I'm not entirely sure.)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (As above and, if I have, not all of it.)
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 (How could I not?! It's my namesake.)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (See 33.)
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 (Regretfully, yes. It was an atrocious waste of time.)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (I'm reading Moonstone by him right now!)
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 (Started but never finished.)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (I own this but haven't read it yet. I do remember starting it in high school though.)
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 (Another I must read)
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (LOVE!)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (So hard to read, but truly wonderful.)
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’ Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (I've never read this and I'm not sure why.)
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Read in the summer of 2001 between lifeguard shifts.)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (I adore this story, there's so much in it.)
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (The whole thing. Every single crazy bit of it.)
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 (Why is this here?)
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 (The awesomest. It was the first book Matthew ever suggested I read and I think that's why I fell in love with him.)
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

71/100 -- on the one hand, I feel a bit like I've let myself down; on the other, there are some incredible books that haven't been included, which really should be in a Big Top 100. I might have to come up with my own top 100, even those books I haven't read but think might be there anyway.

Comments

[Laura]

I'd love to see your top 100 - or at the very least your top 20!

[Robynn]

...and definitely, definitely the Time Traveller's Wife!

[Robynn]

Add A Fine Balance and Cloud Atlas to your "intend to" list. Really. Especially A Fine Balance.

[rebecca]

Since you insisted, I played too :-)

I thought of you yesterday (or was it thursday? seems like yesterday) when I was (re)watching Stranger than Fiction.

cheers!