The Snarky Book Meme

[shadowkat]

Snagged courtesy of deevilish: Because the intro and rules made me giggle. Particularly number 4. (Hmmm, not sure this is a problem for my flist, you guys/gals tend to be more bookwormy than I am. Heck you give me a run for my money. But we'll see.)

[As an aside, it occurs to me that this post would work more effectively if it weren't for all the typos scattered here and there. Off to correct a few, if I can find them - they are always clearer in the actual post than in the little box you are writing the post in - for some odd reason.]

The Big Read 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 started but did not finish.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ 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 - one does not love the Bible, one contemplates the Bible and tries to figure out why so many people feel the need to take every word in it as literal fact or as the rules to live by, particularly when it gives such contradictory advice.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - gothic romance meets abusive relationship - and you thought Joss Whedon started this trend??
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - does anyone love this book? It's not the sort of book one loves and wants to re-read, methinks. More the sort, you read, go, oh god, am haunted by for years, have nightmares about, and consider killing your high school English Teacher for enforcing it on your unsuspecting and somewhat suggestive brain. Although - it probably gave the writers of La Femme Nikita some ideas.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - sooo not a Dickens fan, or maybe it's just this particular story.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - seen too many film versions, sort of ruines the suspense.
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare- I was an English Lit Major - you sort of have to. One does not love reading Shakespeare, one loves watching Shakespearen performances done well, such as the Kenneth Brangath oevre. But not Derek Jacobi - who was somewhat dull. Although the best by far was Ian McKellan in Richard the Third.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - saw too many film versions, ruined the suspense. Best one was the Hitchcock one.
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - overated book, so not worth the hype. I liked Vision Quest and A Separate Peace better. Actually I liked Ethan From better and that's saying something.
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - a bit like reading certain sections of the Bible - and Scarlett married so and so and begat this many kids, divorced him, and married this guy...trust me on this, the movie is sooo much better.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - some day I'll buy a better translation and try again.
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - don't suppose owning it counts?
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 - so sue me, I'm a Jane Austen lover.
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis- you do realize that The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe is PART of the Chronicles of Narnia, right? This is not like the Hobbit, which is NOT part of The Lord of the Rings, but a book that can be read separately. This is like Fellowship of the Ring or say The Golden Compass...that said, it's the only volumn of the series I really liked. The others get a tad misogynistic and violent, demonstrating pretty much all the reasons some good folk don't like/appreciate Christianity all that much. I'm not quite sure why they do this, but they confuse the practice of Christianity with violent warfare, misogynistic preaching, and homophobia...why is that, do you think?? Why on earth would anyone think Christianity was violent, patronizing, and somewhat misanthropic after reading these books? Of course one could argue that technically speaking The Bible makes Narnia look pretty peaceful in comparison.
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - in this case? the book better than the movie.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - yes, I read the Da Vinci Code but have not read Bleak House, War & Peace, Anna Karena, or Crime & Punishment, sad I know, but there it is. In my defense - I'll state that I was incapaciatated with a severe cold at the time and my parents thrust it at me and told it me to read it. Very good book to read when one has the flu, requires as little concentration as possible, yet at the same time somewhat entertaining.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - it's like reading a gothic romance written by the guy who writes stereo instructions. The movie with Guy Wise was better.
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - a teenage Jane Austen, what's not to like.
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - I find Atwood indigestible at times, odd I know.
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - haunting - yes, likable? not so much. But it definitely stays with you forever, helped greatly by all the tv shows and films that rip off the plot, I'm sure.
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - hate comes to mind. Love not so much.
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (One wonders if people who loved Atonement could love Dune and vice versa?? )
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - amongst the few Austen's I could not get into.
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - stereo instructions comes to mind.
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - you read it, you never forget it.
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 - still trying, again having seen two film versions, one quite excellent by Stanley Kubrick, may have ruined it for me.
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - another overrated popular book that I hate.
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -- somehow I've managed to avoid Hardy, yet read Bridget Jones Diary...what type of English Lit major was I anyhow???
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville -- also managed to avoid, go figure.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - I own it, just can't get past the first chapter, Jonathan annoys me.
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - yes, I loved Ulysess but can't get into War & Peace and hated Atonement, I'm weird, we know this.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - One of my all time favorite childrens books, adored this book. Have not seen it since. Great anti-violence book. Much better than Narnia...but no one seems to know it.
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt - what's not to love? Only Byatt, I do love actually...possibly because it's the only one I've managed to make it all the way through.
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell --- requires far too much concentration at the moment
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 -- this is a book, I can promise you I will never read, unless you pay me a million bucks, then I might consider it.
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - I scanned most of it for an essay on Buffy.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - in French, no less. Didn't everyone who take French class read it? That and Voltaire's Candide for some reason.
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - not a book one likes so much as makes it through...and feels oddly better for doing it.
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - my favorite Nevil Shute, much better than the more well known and popular - On the Beach, which I can't get through.
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas -- I probably should have tackled this over the Conte of Monte Cristo, methinks, I'd have gotten further.
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - again, you do realize that this part of the Complete Works of Shakespeare, right??? It's like that Narnia thing all over again. So if you've read the Complete Works of Shakespeare - you get two books for the price of one, cool beans. (So if the average adult has read only six books on this list and four of those books are Hamlet, Complete Works of Shakespeare, Narnia, and Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe...does this mean they've in reality only read four books? OR if they've only read six on the list, but two not on the list which would have been if Hamlet and Lion,the Witch, Wardrobe weren't there...does this mean they have actually read more? What if they read everything on the list but Narnia and Shakespeare - so that means they read everything but four books instead of say two??? Goes to show you how easy it really is to manipulate statistics, doesn't it??)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo -- I saw the films and the musical, but something tells me that ain't the same thing.

As an aside, I really hate coding, specifically html. How you people enjoy doing this is beyond me. Took a blasted twenty minutes to correct all my dropped tags. But people do...or you wouldn't have all those links and pretty graphic styles on your ljs, and there wouldn't be web sites like teaattheford and others of that ilk which are basically 89% coding, (did you think they got pretty on their own? Noope, coding, people. Lots of coding!) one of the many reasons I stopped posting at certain forums, besides lack of time and dwindling interest - was because I got tired of getting bitchslapped gently scolded for screwing up on codes (what they didn't know was I'd spent hours trying to get the blasted thing right, only to have it screw up - coding and dyslexia do not make good bedfellows) - and I always screwed up the codes. Zip patience for this type of stuff. But shouldn't complain, DOS was far worse. If you were born after 1980, you probably never experienced DOS. It was painful, except of course for techies who adore coding, and still miss it. But have managed to find something even cooler - html, asci, and all those other IT words that I can never remember!


I'm wondering about the meaning of the statement that the average adult has only read six of the books on this list. It's a Fun list, since I've read most of it. But an odd one. One can't help but wonder what the criteria was, particularly since two of the books have technically been repeated twice, which seems to be a bit like cheating to me or at the very least manipulating the stats.

Of course I was wondering much the same thing in regards to criteria not statistical manipulation, reading the Emmy and Saturn nominations. To give them credit, the emmy list made more sense than the Saturns. The Saturns are supposed to be for sci-fi and fantasy films and tv shows. Except this year we have No Country for Old Men and August Rush nominated? Huh? BSG isn't on the list. Nor is much of Doctor Who or the number of other fantasy and sci-fi films that came out. Instead the listed pretty much the same ones I see in mainstream awards, which begs the question - what is the point of the Saturns and why do we care? Or rather why does anyone, besides those who win the things? The Emmy's I stopped paying attention to when I found out how they nominate the things - it's based on reels that the nominees submit. Weirder still, most of the people voting for them and selecting them don't watch any television. It's not like the Oscars, where the voters actually have seen 85-90% of the films, no, this is tv - no way could they have seen most of tv. Few watch it. What they see is what is heavily promoted. Which is why I think the Emmy's are sort of pointless, unless of course you are the one being nominated and winning the things, then not so much.

My favorite awards show is the Tony's - it's by far the most entertaining, you get to see samples of all the plays and musicals on Broadway, and read during the speechs, or I do, because I don't care who wins.

[There's no snarky mood icon, so I went for Bitchy. Not quite the same, but close enough.]

Comments

[mamculuna.livejournal.com]

Ok, am searching for Swallows and Amazons.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

I hate coding too... so I always post in 'rich text' which lets me just push the buttons for Bold or whatever.... (I do have to type code in the comments section, it IS annoying!

So I've read 36 out of the 100, I've started at least a half dozen of the other without finishing them (I never will either, I'm sure).

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I came up with 51, or 48 if you don't include duplicates. Started roughly 12 or 13 of the rest, and own quite a few that I've never opened.

I've tried the rich text format, but doesn't work for me - my mouse click function doesn't work well on the net - with my laptop. It did with desktop, but not with laptop, has to do with the whole mousepad bit. I also have troubles with video games for some reason.

The hardest things for me to html or code are "block" quotes. I had to do this all the time on a scholarly Buffy site, that I used to post essays and fanfic to. Beautiful site and well preserved, but incredibly painful to post on if you don't have a great mousepad and aren't good at codes/tags. Posting essays on the net has begun to require formatting skills that I just don't have much patience for, I'm afraid.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

yeah, Whedonesque is really hard to deal with... they expect you to embed the link, but it all has to be done by typing a lot of code which I find to be such a hassle. It can take me 20 minutes to complete even a short post!

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Yep. I've pretty much given up entirely. After a while I decided it just wasn't worth the energy - so I no longer even try to post anywhere that I can't just do it simply, without a lot of coding.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Swallows and Amazons (and the sequels) perhaps better known in the UK than the USA? - though there is at least one other US person on my flist who loved it and played in that universe as a child.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

It's been a long time since I've read them. I only vaguely remember the first one - but I do remember adoring it and re-reading it more than a couple of times. I think it had a strong female protagonist, which was difficult to find.

Not sure how I found the book or who gave it to me. It was too long ago. I think I must have been in the fifth or sixth grade when I read it, around the same time I read the Narnia novels, and the Dark is Rising books, which I didn't like as well for some reason.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

What I really liked (with hindsight) about the S&A books is that they had several strong female characters: not just the tomboy Nancy, but the dreamy yet effective Titty and Mate Susan, who could be relied on to get the fire lit and food provided for the hungry under all circumstances. And in the later books, Dick of the Ds (Dick and Dorothea) is a different kind of male figure: proto-geekynerd guy liable to lapse into brown studies but also capable of figuring stuff out on scientific principles.

Though I find it just slightly sad that John of the Swallows was based on a female original! The original of Roger became a world-renowned specialist on asthma (Roger Altounyan).

Further trivia: Ransome's second wife had been Trotsky's secretary - they met when he was a foreign correspondent in Russia during and just after the Revolution.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Like I said, I've forgotten most of it. But you reminded me of one of the reasons I adored it - I loved the survival aspect - keeping the fire lit, and food provided, the women bonding together to create a life for themselves.

It was hard to find novels back then that had tomboy heroines or heroines who were not into 'girly' pursuits, and liked to climb trees, swim, sail a ship, and strategize.
Now, it's a little easier...but we still have to struggle.

Don't remember the names well enough or the personalities...I vaguely remember who John of the Swallows was - I think he was the enemy and latter love interest of one of the Amazons?? Can't remember, too long ago. Over 30 years, since I read it.