Another exercise in html tagging - meme

[shadowkat]

Ganked from rozk

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

I think I did this meme before, but can't remember. Will state that I'm impressed that Ayn Rand did not make the list. She's usually on all of them. Also who makes up these lists? Some of the selections suprised me. Bridget Jones Diary? Harry Potter? Uhm okay. But they aren't books that people haven't read, hardly obscure. What, does the BBC think the six books people have read are those?


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -I have read most of it, quite possibly all of it, but I could not put my hand on it and swear to every verse...
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 - I may have skipped bits of The Two Gentlemen of Verona and a few others
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - going to be read soon.
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 HitchHiker’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 - C.S. Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres -
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. 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 Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (I read the Robber Bridgegroom and a host of short stories...
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (I reviewed and hated it.)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (in a weekend in proof for the publisher)
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
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 - I may have given the author one of the ideas...
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
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 (uh, if you read the complete works of Shakespeare - you probably read this.)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - I don't know if I read it. I've seen five filmed versions of it.

I can't remember half the things I've read. I read whatever meets my fancy and is available.
And don't really care if it is considered good or not by everyone else.

Comments

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Oh should clarify - I don't think of Proust, Dante, Updike, Roth or Oats as underground.

I'd say they were focusing primarily on British Writers - but that's not true - there are several non-British writers in there. I'm just not sure of the criteria.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Well it does make some sense that the BBC was primarily proud of British authors, and they should be...
but you are right there are so many brilliant authors who are not represented that should be...
I was just thinking of the Nobel Prize winners for literature:
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/
which covers a lot of authors who are all well worth reading!

But all in all it was an interesting list of books

And yeah, I"m pretty sure I've done this one before too.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

I find the book lists on the net - sort of odd. Particularly in these memes. Mostly popular books and/or books that you were assigned in college.

I have seen the meme for the Nobel Prize writers, the Booker Prize, and the National Book Award. I think I've read a couple on each of those lists.

Some day I wish someone would do a pulp meme - with romance, sci-fi, fantasy, mystery pulp novels.

[embers-log.livejournal.com]

Maybe you should create one?! But have you read enough romance novels (because Georgette Heyer deserves to be included) and/or mysteries (one can't stop with Agatha Christie, there are a lot of amazing mystery writers out there)? I know for sure that you have read a LOT of fantasy and sci-fi.... Oh and to be fair I guess it should include Westerns? I've never read a single Western but it is a popular genre category.

[shadowkat67.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've read more romance novels, mystery novels, etc - to count. Can't remember half of them or the writers. After a while it all begins to blur together. Actually have read less sci-fi and fantasy, since they are harder to find and require dealing with dust and mail-ordering.