Monday, February 23, 2009

So you think you're well-read?


Actually, I consider myself pretty well-read. But occasionally a list comes along that makes me feel a bit inferior.

This is a list that's going around on Facebook. Supposedly the British Broadcasting Corporation thinks the average person will have read only 6 of them. I've done better than the "average" person, having read 31 of them--but someone who responded to this on Facebook had read 60!

Truth to tell, this list doesn't make me feel inferior, because there are books on the list that I frankly have no desire to read, and never will.

I've bold-faced the ones I've read. Take a look at the list, and if there's some titles on there that you really recommend, let me know and tell me why! (Oh--and having seen the movie DOESN'T count! :))

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--although I've read SOME of them!
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
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
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
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
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
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 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
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce--(this is what Ben Linus was reading on the plane on "Lost" the other night!)
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 - 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 - Enid Blyton (No--but I've read lots of other Enid Blyton books!)
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 ()--love the musical, though

6 comments:

Randy Spradlin said...

Cindy,

According to the list, I am not well-read. Actually, I am, but not with most of the titles. And who makes these lists anyway? Ha. What if you or I came up with our list and give it to them, hmmmm?

Hope you are doing well.

Randy

Ann-Marie said...

I've seen a lot of these in movies, but I'm guessing that doesn't count!

Deborah Raney said...

I used to average 50-60 books a year, and considered myself well-read, but by this, I'm not. Only 15 of them (and quite a few of those in high school and college because I was forced to). But one I CAN recommend that you haven't read, Cindy, is Watership Down. My brother-in-law recommended it, and he's not a reader. I couldn't put it down and fell in love with the unique characters. Ann-Marie, if you haven't read it, you'll especially love it judging by your profile photo. : )

Juliet said...

Well let me try this again. I just lost all of my comment.:)

I've read the Kite Runner. It's a true story. Read it and let me know what you think.

I too would have done a great job if we were counting movies. Sorry.

I usually read autobiographies, biographies, theology themes, and just a good old mystery book.

If they have inclueded the Mitford series, I would being doing better. I've read all of them.

Cindy Swanson said...

Juliet, so many people have told me to read The Kite Runner. I don't know why I just haven't been able to do it!

By the way, I should've mentioned that some of the titles I read were also under duress (forced by high school and college English classes. :))

imaGPT said...

I second Kite Runnner.
If only movies counted,lol, I would double my list easily. I count 13 I read before the age of 16 and then two more I read in the last two years. So I'm up to 15!

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