Monday, September 8, 2008

I like to read blogs when I'm waiting for people to show up for appointments. This morning I ran across this one. I liked the idea of a list of books and this one had a surprising number that I have read. The National Endowment for the Arts has a program called the Big Read. Here is the list. The average number of books that an individual has read is 6.


Look at the list and bold those we have read.


*Italicize those we intend to read.

  1. The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkien
  2. Pride and Predudice - Jand Austen
  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 Shakespeare1

  15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

  16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

  17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

  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

  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 Lewis3

  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 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 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

  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

  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

  99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

  100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I've read over half of the selections. Some I read on my own and some as a result of being an English Major in college. I don't have any italicized because I don't usually have intentions to read something. If I see it and it appeals to me, I read it. I may read the Golden Compass and the others in the trilogy because my daughter keeps telling me how much I'd like it. (I liked the movie a lot).

How'd you do?

PS I finished the body of the Wildflowers Shawl on Sunday with the yarn that Teresa sent me. There is a little more blue in the new skein but since it is across the top and will be on the edges, it's all good. Now I have to figure out how to attach the edging as I knit it. I'd rather not knit the edging separately and then graft it on which is an option. Learning to knit the edging onto the shawl as I go is part of the process for me. It's what I have learned from this project. I am still a new enough knitter that I learn something from each project I attempt. I'll try to take some photos. It's really pretty.

Happy Monday!

7 comments:

Bezzie said...

Hm, only 12. But I don't read many penis-penned stories. I don't know why, it's just a weird quirk I've developed as I've gotten older.

DPUTiger said...

Do Audiobooks count? Last summer I "read" the entire Golden Compass series with BBC-produced full-cast recordings and they were FANTASTIC! I loved the first, liked the second and the third was good, but by then the author's religious agenda was hitting you over the head with a sledgehammer.

Gotta really look at that list and see what I have and haven't read. I need to read more, and not just my fluffy brain candy books!

Sheepish Annie said...

I'm always a little horrified by how many classics I have not read. I really do read! Honest! Like at least a book a week!

I really gotta raise my taste level a bit here...

Anonymous said...

Great meme - I'm trying to read more classics (listening to Tale of Two Cities on the train). Can't wait to see the shawl!

Rose Red said...

I've read a lot of those books (too many to count!) - mainly thanks to my English major in my Arts degree!

Amy Lane said...

I can not wait to see the wildflowers shawl--and though most of those looked really familiar (as in, I've probably read about 1/2 of them!) my mind is shot--no lists today!

MadMad said...

Oh, I was just going to say you might want to try the Golden Compass series (I noticed it wasn't emboldened...) and then you said you thought you might! Funny. Anyway, yes, give it a try - they were good books. (The first and second better than the third, but that's often the case, isn't it?)

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