This is a meme I got off a friend's Facebook page. It's actually more than 100 books because several series titles are included in single entries. The original instructions called for some x/+/* rating system but since I'm pretty sure I've read nearly everything on here I will bold what I haven't read and italicize what I haven't finished reading. Tally at the bottom.
And btw, there are two boo-boos because a) The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe are both listed, and b) Hamlet and the Complete WS are both listed, as well as at least two things that shouldn't be on this list. You'll figure those out.
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
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
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 (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 (why is this here?)
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 - 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 Gibbon
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
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 (also, shouldn't be 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
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (which is a duplicate because all Shakespeare is included above)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Let's see, I've read 78 of the 100 listed plus another 9 that I'm part-way through (I don't think I'll ever finish Dune, though).
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
ReplyDelete15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbon
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (also, shouldn't be here)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
This list is really confusing to me. I strongly suspect it was started by someone on Facebook who simply looked at his bookshelf and decided that what he'd read constituted good literature as opposed to anything like consensus about a Western canon (and this list is absurdly Western oriented, which just further makes me think it's shabby), then just sat there with his head turned sideways, typing out each title as his eyes strayed to it.
Like I said, the western-oriented thing is bad enough, but look also at who isn't there. Trollope, Hawthorne, Johnson, Pope, the Jacobeans, Marlowe, any philosophy/philosopher, Pynchon, Wallace, Joyce, Mailer, Lewis, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Gorky, Gogol, Grass, Goethe, Mann, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Byron, Coleridge, etc. And don't even get me started on lack of historians and history. No Macaulay? For shame.
Then there are all the books I quoted and bolded above. There's a whole bunch of confusion about that. First of all, if you're trying to figure out how "well read" someone is, naming a bunch of default children's classics seems sort of counterproductive, since it's a safe assumption any serious reader as an adult probably got that way from exposure to good literature as a child/teen. Second of all, what's with the genre literature? I mean, Jesus Christ, Bridget Jones rips off Pride and Prejudice and is sort of reductively insulting about modern women, while Dune manages to be less evocative than the history of Arab bedouins it liberally steals from. And there's a really weird attitude to listing books written in the last 10-15 years. Hell, I loved Donna Tartt's The Secret History, but unless she writes another book as good as it, nobody's going to be reading that 50 years from now. The same can probably said for half the other recent books listed. Our tastes change; what seems important in one era becomes irrelevant in even a generation. Why not ask about the timeless things that we are assured don't bespeak a current faddishness?
Anyway, I guess I'm saying this list annoys the crap outta me.
Agreed on all counts. Can I cop out and claim boredom? Pretty much everyone in the group on FB complained that the list was random but we were all too lazy to either make a new one or amend the current one.
ReplyDeleteSure. I empathize with both boredom and laziness.
ReplyDeleteYou ARE well read! Someone sent this to me on facebook awhile ago and I think I was at a little less than half. Must catch up.
ReplyDeleteSee you around FirstLook!