book meme and meta

[jinian]

The meme (brought to me by firecat) goes: "The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed." But what Big Read came up with this list?


The BBC Big Read from 2003 list doesn't match this one.

The US National Endowment for the Arts Big Read doesn't appear to have a top 100 list at all, though some of these books are recommended there as well.

Dayton, Ohio, appears to have a Big Read of just one book per year. Likewise the Big Read of Catawba County, North Carolina.

The best thing I found is the results for German and Hungarian books at Wikipedia!

Other best 100 lists:
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnonfiction.html
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100rivallist.html
http://www.wesselenyi.com/top100books.htm
http://www.nicholaswhyte.info/100books/mccrum.htm
http://www.abc.net.au/myfavouritebook/top10/100.htm [Shares the top 2 with this list, and gets points for listing the Bible as by "Various contributors"]
http://www.the-bookman.com/main/Best.books.html [Possibly the most in line with my own inclinations]
http://www.eternalwarriors.com/TBbooklist.html [Also pleasingly geeky]


Where is this list actually from? I find it, without comment or justification, at the Telegraph. No sign of the "only 6" business.

Meme starts here:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Strike out the ones you thought SUCKED.

As with firecat, I didn't think any of them SUCKED. And LOVE is a strong term, though I did admit to a couple.

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 [Easy to make a list of 100 if you conflate 7 books into one!]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee [required reading for HS]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [see Harry Potter]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott [I think]
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare [I may have missed a couple.]
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks [Haven't even heard of this one.]
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
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 [required in high school]
29 Alice’s Adventures 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 [see Harry Potter]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
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 [hahahahaha NO.]
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 [required in high school]
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 [Not my favorite Bryson.]
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
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
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle [See Harry Potter, only with more emphasis!]
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 [Legacy of Dad's Australia kick.]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
[63]

Comments

[firecat]

Thanks for tracking down where this list came from.

What's your favorite Bryson? (Mine is A Brief History of Everything.)

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I actually haven't read that one yet, but I really enjoyed A Walk in the Woods. Not sure how it'll stand up to rereading, though; he can seem sort of petty as well as hilarious.

[marzipan-pig.livejournal.com]

I'm a little shocked that you wouldn't have read the bible, but whatever :)

I wouldn't say I'd read ALL of it, but definitely the gospels, skipped around some in the new testament, and then a bunch of the juicy bits (watered down for Sunday school but still) of the old testament, with some recreational reading of my own.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Well, exactly, I haven't read all of it. I didn't count 6/7 of the Harry Potter listed, either, and I'm pretty sure that's a larger fraction than my Bible-reading.

[swanjun.livejournal.com]

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes is actually a single book. It's the first of the short story compilations (preceded by two novels).

[jinian.livejournal.com]

Oh, thanks, I wasn't sure whether there were multiple collections called that or what. It's possible that I was expecting them to conflate things by that point in the list.

[swanjun.livejournal.com]

It's very possible that they were and just accidentally hit upon the title of an actual book. :) It does, however, contain some of the more famous short stories, so it could conceivably be intentional.