The Big Read

I discovered the list of the top 100 books printed on Melody's Vita et Vertas blog and thought it would make for a good post today. I've succumbed to a form of the Mystery Virus, and this was a relatively simple post to make. While I sip on my chicken noodle soup. At 4:00 in the afternoon. The first thing I've dared put in my system. :-l

The Big Read has determined that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books printed. How do you stack up?

The Rules:
1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

I, of course, couldn't leave the rules alone, so I added one: Put a ? by the books you think you might have read. I did a *lot* of reading in Jr. High and High School (ask my teachers; I often had a book in my lap in math, science, band, even*), and I'm not positive whether I did or didn't read some of these.


And, because I wasn't familiar with all the books and really just needed something mindless to do, anyway, I decided to put Amazon links for each book (I'm choosing the cheapest, often, to link, although occasionally, I'm going with the most visually appealing cover), in case you were curious, too. I think the kids and I will watch a movie...

As I'm working through the list, I've contrived another symbol: %%. Books I learned I would like to read from researching them for this list. Some of them I'd heard of before. Others are completely new to me. But none marked %% would I have said for sure I'd want to read before looking at the plot summary today.

And then, of course, I had to know which of the 100 are included in Sonlight cores (not that I think they all should, just that I was curious). So, the bolded ones are.

*1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
%2. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
%4. Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling (well, I read the first one, does that count?)
*5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6. The Bible
*7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
**8. 1984 - George Orwell
%9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
?10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11. Little Women - Louisa May 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 - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
%%18. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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- 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 Bernières -
%39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**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
*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 (hated it...)
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 - Émile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
%%80. Possession - A.S. 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 - E.B. White
%%88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
**89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - 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

ETA: So, that means I've read 33-37 of the 100 books (you'll notice that most of the ones I'm not sure about have movie versions, so I can't just check to see if I recognize the plot :-/). And now, I have a list of books to check out for myself when we hit the library in the US in the spring. This process also made me think that an electronic reader is likely in our future. Especially living overseas, the instant access to so many of the books via a Kindle or some other reader is quite tempting.

Oh, and I couldn't find a copy of this list on The Big Read's website, so I had to clean up Melody's list myself (and just to make it look "right," I had to put a "." after each number; I'm a little anal that way). If anyone wants to post the list, let me know, and I'll put up the "clean" version to save you the trouble.

* Case in point: in 8th grade, I worked very hard to get my English teacher's "Outside Reading Award" for which we catalogued all books read outside the ones she assigned to us. It was neck and neck between Katie Shelton and myself, if I remember correctly, but I won (sorry, Katie, wherever you are). Only some of my other teachers protested. They claimed that I had could not win an "Outside" reading award when in fact the reading had been done "Inside" their classes. :-P (They were kidding. Sort of. But I still got the award.)