{"id":155,"date":"2008-09-22T06:00:59","date_gmt":"2008-09-22T13:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/?p=155"},"modified":"2008-09-24T09:52:20","modified_gmt":"2008-09-24T16:52:20","slug":"the-big-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/the-big-read\/","title":{"rendered":"The Big Read"},"content":{"rendered":"

Found this on Maureen McGowan’s blog<\/a> (who found it on Sara Hantz’s blog<\/a>\u2014hi, Sara!). Seems The Big Read<\/a>, sponsored by the BBC, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. How do you fare?<\/p>\n

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
\n2) Italicize those you intend to read.
\n3) Underline the books you LOVE.<\/p>\n

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen<\/strong>
\n2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien<\/strong>
\n<\/span>3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
\n<\/span><\/strong>4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
\n5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee<\/em>
\n6 The Bible<\/strong> (Yes, I’ve read the whole damn thing\u2014whoops, sorry on the damn. After taking a university course in the The Bible as Literature, I figured I should. I didn’t read anything else while I read the Bible. It took me 9 or 10 months to read THE WHOLE THING).
\n7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
\n8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell<\/strong>
\n9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
\n10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens<\/strong>
\n11 Little Women – Louisa M. Alcott<\/span><\/strong>
\n12 Tess of the D\u2019Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy<\/span><\/strong>
\n13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller<\/em>
\n14 Complete Works of Shakespeare<\/span><\/strong> (Okay, not the Complete<\/em> Works. I’ve read ALL the Histories, but believe I got stuck halfway through the Comedies. Which is too bad, because I like his Tragedies the best\u2014having also read several Shakespeare plays for various English classes over the years\u2014and I didn’t make it to that volume. I tried the same routine as with the Bible\u2014not allowing myself to read anything else until I read The Complete Works. I stopped reading anything at all<\/em>, so I had to dash that plan.) (At this point I should admit I have a collection of the Hundred Greatest Books Ever Written, which is how I got stuck intending to read three volumes in a row of Shakespeare). (I read the Bible before I had kids).<\/span><\/span>
\n15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
\n16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien<\/span><\/strong>
\n17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
\n18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
\n<\/em>19 The Time Traveller\u2019s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
\n20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
\n<\/strong>21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
\n<\/span>22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
\n<\/strong>23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (I may have read this and forgotten\u2014I forget a lot of the books I’ve read,\u00a0a side effect of Reading Too Much).
\n24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy<\/strong>
\n25 The Hitch Hiker\u2019s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
\n26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
\n27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky<\/strong> (Not that I remember any of it\u2014another side effect of Reading Too Much).
\n28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck<\/strong><\/span>
\n29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (May Have Read It, Don’t Remember, See Caveat Above)
\n30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
\n31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy<\/strong>
\n32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
\n<\/strong>33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
\n34 Emma – Jane Austen
\n35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
\n36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis<\/strong>
\n37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
\n38 Captain Corelli\u2019s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
\n39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden<\/span><\/strong>
\n40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne<\/strong>
\n41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
\n42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
\n<\/strong>43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
\n45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
\n46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery<\/strong><\/span>
\n47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy<\/strong>
\n48 The Handmaid\u2019s Tale – Margaret Atwood<\/span><\/strong>
\n49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding<\/strong>
\n50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
\n52 Dune – Frank Herbert
\n53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
\n54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen<\/strong>
\n55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
\n56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
\n57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens<\/span><\/strong>
\n58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley<\/strong>
\n59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
\n60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
\n61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck<\/strong>
\n62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
\n63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
\n64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold<\/span><\/strong>
\n65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
\n66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
\n67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy<\/span><\/strong>
\n68 Bridget Jones\u2019s Diary – Helen Fielding<\/strong>
\n69 Midnight\u2019s Children – Salman Rushdie
\n70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville<\/strong>
\n71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens<\/strong>
\n72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (I have it, but have I read it?)
\n73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
\n74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson<\/strong>
\n75 Ulysses – James Joyce<\/strong>
\n76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath<\/span><\/strong>
\n77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
\n78 Germinal – Emile Zola
\n79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray<\/strong>
\n80 Possession – AS Byatt
\n81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
\n<\/strong>82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
\n83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
\n<\/span><\/strong>84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
\n85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert<\/strong>
\n86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry<\/strong>
\n87 Charlotte\u2019s Web – EB White
\n88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
\n89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (can’t remember – I have it, but have I read it?)
\n90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
\n91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
\n<\/strong>92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
\n93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
\n94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
\n95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
\n96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
\n97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
\n98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare<\/strong>
\n99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
\n100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo<\/p>\n

If I’m counting right, I’ve read at least 51 of the books on this list. Let me note that I’ve read dozens of books not on this list, but should be. Only one Margaret Atwood listing? No John Irving? What kind of list is this?<\/p>\n

Okay, I majored in English, too. That accounts for a handful of the list. The rest I read because I am demented. You try reading ALL of Moby Dick, and not no abridged version, neither. You read that whale encyclopedia in the middle. We’ll see how sane you are after that!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Found this on Maureen McGowan’s blog (who found it on Sara Hantz’s blog\u2014hi, Sara!). Seems The Big Read, sponsored by the BBC, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list. How do you fare? 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.… Continue reading The Big Read<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-authors","category-this-and-that","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}