100 Book Meme

[effex]

via ciceqi - To quote: "Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average."

The list:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (four years at a private Christian school, whut.)
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'Ubervilles - 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 Faulk
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 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 - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (why is this separate?)
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 Atwood52 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 - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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 (many, many, many times - I loved this book as a teen)
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
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


So that's... 25 out of 100, which I guess is better then 7 (seriously, 7?). And another 19 partially read. Although some of these are less 'books' and more 'a series of books and/or short stories and/or plays,' which I suspect is cheating.

EDIT: Did some research because, seriously, what's up with this list? Turns out it's from an article in the Guardian and is the result of a popular book poll. Which explains it, I guess.

Comments

[zanzando]

Huh, this is cool. You're way ahead of me, I've only completely read 12 of these.
Then again, I've spent a good amount of my formative years reading the "great" German literature (Goethe, Schiller, Mann (all three of them), Storm, Kafka (okay so he's Czech, but he wrote in German), Heine, Rilke, etc. ...). This is fairly anglo-centric I think?

[nepenthe]

Diversity?! Dude, this list is not only undiversified in its Anglo-centric-ness, it is undiversified among its Anglo-centric works. Dickens is on there SIX TIMES, Austen four; they insist you read the COMPLETE Works of Shakespeare (R U KIDDING ME? If Stephen Greenblatt hasn't read ALL of Shakespeare, I don't think we should make that accomplishment worth ONLY one lousy point). But reading Hamlet? That'll do you for the equivalent of ALL. They do something similar when they list "The Chronicles of Narnia" and "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" as two separate points.

I was also a bit taken aback by the lack if Mann or Kafka or Sartre, and that was before reading your comment.

I've got 27 read, but only 8 partial. For some unfathomable reason, my read books are similar to the ones above. . .

Finally, this list lacks "Harold and the Purple Crayon," the greatest work of literature known to man, and as such I declare it null and void.

[effex]

The list is freaking strange, yes. I'm trying to find the original, but tracing the meme back eventually gets me to a locked journal.

Aha! Googling around nets me this - on the Guardian, Books you can't live without: the top 100. Well, if this is a popular book list, I guess it makes a little more sense?

For some unfathomable reason

[snerk]

[zanzando]

WORD.
I mean, except for "Harold and the Purple Crayon" - I'm not familiar with that.
Since effex has since discovered the source to be a list of popular books, we can direct our head-shaking at lack of general reading-related activities rather than at the makers of the list.
On that note, since I'm now compiling my own list of German book canon, lemme tell you: that shit is hard.


*Re-reading my earlier comment, I'd like to clarify: by "all three of them", I meant Thomas, Heinrich and Klaus Mann. Not Goethe, Schiller and Mann. /lit-snobbishness

[nepenthe]

"Harold and the Purple Crayon," by Crockett Johnson, is a CLASSIC children's book. I added that bit since effex knows it was the book I took to bed with me every night as a child along-side my blanket (which I called my "ki-dough-go").

Yes. A book was my teddy bear. Forever will it stand as everything I love about books.

[effex]

Just a little anglo-centric, which makes it even sadder that most anglo types have only read 7. If we can't be bothered to read our own damn canon...

[zanzando]

I had a really horribly mean moment where I thought (before reading the list) that they meant the Harry Potter series when they said 7 books.
I mean, what about required reading in schools? When I went through my initial list of 101 German-language books, I counted 35 that I had read for school!
And that's only German-language literature, we read important English novels in those classes as well, and some others in German class ...