Memery and rantification
Jun. 30th, 2008 03:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
megwritesI ganked this from all over:
"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you really love (and strikethrough the ones you hate!).
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
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 Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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 - CS Lewis
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
Okay, so somebody inform me - what buttbrain came up with this list? Seriously.
I scored a 22 out of 100, which isn't technically true, because this list is just retarded. Why?
1. Because the list actually counts The Complete Works of Shakespeare and then counts Hamlet. Last I checked, Hamlet fit neatly into the first category. Also? Hamlet is a play. I understand counting it as *literature*, but it is not, technically speaking a book. So, if you've read all the works of Shakespeare (and god love you if you actually have) - you get two marks on the list. I think you should get more if you actually bothered with Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus and all bazillion of the Henry plays. Also? They count the Narnia series and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" separately. 'nuff said.
2. The entire Harry Potter series is counted as one book. Umm, no. I think anyone who got through all seven of those doorstop worthy wizarding tomes deserves seven books worth of credit, because they read *seven different books*. Either pick one of the series or give credit for all of it.
3. The Bible is included in this list. Counting it as a book is problematic in oh so many ways. And excluding such works as The Torah and The Koran are also problematic.
4. We're counting The Da Vinci Code as great literature? Really? Not to insult the book, which I didn't get all the way through, thus didn't count - but I don't think it was all that great. So let me do this math. Books not on the list: Fahrenheit 451, Beloved, Stranger In A Strange Land. But the Da Vinci Code made it. I guess you're not really a great author until Tom Hanks is in the movie version.
5. These are almost entirely fiction, and the list is not entitled "100 Top Works of Fiction". It's entitled "Top 100 Books". So, people who read non-fiction heavily get penalized. If you've educated yourself with biographies and histories and scientific books, you're still dumb as far as this list is concerned. I write and read fiction and its subgenres as my bread and butter, but some of the most important, most vital pieces of literature in our history are *not* fictional. Also? This makes the inclusion of the Bible triply problematic. Calling the Bible a work of fiction now, are we?
6. Wow, way to be culturally close minded. There are a lot of important non-Western books that deserve to be read. I personally think everyone should read The Art of War at least once in their lives, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is a wonderful book as well. Come on. The Upanishads? The I Ching? Silly me. Only Western books are important. [/sarcasm].
7. AND Way to be chronologically close minded. Apparently our selections are limited to those books written from 1800-2007. I guess all those Greek and Roman guys really wasted their time with such things as The Iliad and The Aenid. At least Chaucer will be happy to know that we've forgotten all about those silly Canterbury Tales.
"The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed."
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you really love (and strikethrough the ones you hate!).
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
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 Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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 - CS Lewis
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
Okay, so somebody inform me - what buttbrain came up with this list? Seriously.
I scored a 22 out of 100, which isn't technically true, because this list is just retarded. Why?
1. Because the list actually counts The Complete Works of Shakespeare and then counts Hamlet. Last I checked, Hamlet fit neatly into the first category. Also? Hamlet is a play. I understand counting it as *literature*, but it is not, technically speaking a book. So, if you've read all the works of Shakespeare (and god love you if you actually have) - you get two marks on the list. I think you should get more if you actually bothered with Coriolanus and Titus Andronicus and all bazillion of the Henry plays. Also? They count the Narnia series and "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" separately. 'nuff said.
2. The entire Harry Potter series is counted as one book. Umm, no. I think anyone who got through all seven of those doorstop worthy wizarding tomes deserves seven books worth of credit, because they read *seven different books*. Either pick one of the series or give credit for all of it.
3. The Bible is included in this list. Counting it as a book is problematic in oh so many ways. And excluding such works as The Torah and The Koran are also problematic.
4. We're counting The Da Vinci Code as great literature? Really? Not to insult the book, which I didn't get all the way through, thus didn't count - but I don't think it was all that great. So let me do this math. Books not on the list: Fahrenheit 451, Beloved, Stranger In A Strange Land. But the Da Vinci Code made it. I guess you're not really a great author until Tom Hanks is in the movie version.
5. These are almost entirely fiction, and the list is not entitled "100 Top Works of Fiction". It's entitled "Top 100 Books". So, people who read non-fiction heavily get penalized. If you've educated yourself with biographies and histories and scientific books, you're still dumb as far as this list is concerned. I write and read fiction and its subgenres as my bread and butter, but some of the most important, most vital pieces of literature in our history are *not* fictional. Also? This makes the inclusion of the Bible triply problematic. Calling the Bible a work of fiction now, are we?
6. Wow, way to be culturally close minded. There are a lot of important non-Western books that deserve to be read. I personally think everyone should read The Art of War at least once in their lives, and The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon is a wonderful book as well. Come on. The Upanishads? The I Ching? Silly me. Only Western books are important. [/sarcasm].
7. AND Way to be chronologically close minded. Apparently our selections are limited to those books written from 1800-2007. I guess all those Greek and Roman guys really wasted their time with such things as The Iliad and The Aenid. At least Chaucer will be happy to know that we've forgotten all about those silly Canterbury Tales.
