Pretentious book meme
February 16th, 2009
I thought I’d continue the book meme found at Nullifidian’s site…
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here, though the closest BBC reference I can find to it is The Big Read from 2003. Either way, it’s time to find out:
Instructions:
- Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY (and not just seen the film!)
- Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
- Star (*) those you plan on reading.
- Tally your total at the bottom.
The BBC reading list:
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien x
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling x
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee x
- The Bible x
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell x+
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman *
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens *
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott *
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller x
- Complete Works of Shakespeare *
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier x
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien x
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger x
- The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch – George Eliot
- Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House – Charles Dickens x
- War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams x+
- Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
- Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll x
- The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame x
- Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy *
- David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis x
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis x
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini *
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne x
- Animal Farm – George Orwell x+
- The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown x
- One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
- The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy *
- The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies – William Golding x
- Atonement – Ian McEwan *
- Life of Pi – Yann Martel x
- Dune – Frank Herbert x
- Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens x
- Brave New World – Aldous Huxley x+
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck x
- Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov *
- The Secret History – Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas *
- On The Road – Jack Kerouac *
- Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding x
- Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie *
- Moby Dick – Herman Melville x
- Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens x
- Dracula – Bram Stoker x
- The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
- Ulysses – James Joyce *
- The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
- Germinal – Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession – AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
- The Color Purple – Alice Walker
- The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte’s Web – EB White x
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle x
- The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery *
- The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks *
- Watership Down – Richard Adams x
- A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas x
- Hamlet – William Shakespeare x+
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl x
- Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
If I’ve tallied correctly, that’s: 34 x / 5 + / 15 * I’ve not read nearly as much as I’d have liked in recent years, but amusingly I have a number of those “want to read” books sitting in a pile in my living room. So much to do, so little time…
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Stupid arbitrary list. What is it supposed to tell you about yourself?
Why is the Magic Far Away Tree (I’ve read it!) on the same list as Catch-22? Why Hamlet and not Macbeth? Why is Harry Potter there but Phillip K. Dick isn’t? How does Dan Brown make the list for that diabolical piece of fiction but Marlowe doesn’t. Why choose one of Bill Bryson’s books over the others? The Lord of the Rings AND the Hobbit?
GAH and PFFT!
Fair points. And how some authors get more than one entry and other notable authors are completely omitted.
It comes down to how the list was compiled for The Big Read which, in these days of online polls and multiple votes, is usually not representative of the population.
But following the nature of most online polls, this is suitably meaningless.