A book meme!

[sophinisba]

Sorry if the uncut version of this showed up on your f-list. Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. :)

Gacked from dreamflower02 and baranduin

To mark the tenth anniversary of World Book Day, a survey has been conducted to find the ten books the nation cannot live without. Over 2000 people voted online, which resulted in the following top 100.

I'm bolding the ones I've read and italicizing the ones I'd like to read.

1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Bible
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. 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, William Shakespeare
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. The 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, Fitzgerald F Scott
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hikers 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 (That's part of the Chronicles of Narnia!)
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, A A Milne
41. Animal Farm, George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
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, Vikrem 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 García Márquez
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, Emil 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 Alborn
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, Alexander Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

I've never read anything by Thomas Hardy. Would anyone like to tell me why I should? Lecture me on anything else? Squee over Nabokov? Ask me how I managed to get through Ulysses?

Comments

[ladysunrope.livejournal.com]

I gave up on Ulysees.*is impressed at your stamina* Thomas Hardy is one for the episodic angst and not to everyone's taste. I like it because I know the countryside it's set in and the historic period it relates to and for me that adds a lot. It's about attitudes and mores of the time and can get fairly grim but it isn't a difficult read -I prefer Hardy to Dickens in that way because Hardy's writing is far less dense. There again, the characters stay with you. My favourite is Jude the Obscure with Tess second.

I've not read 37, 51, 59,93, 95. This was a nice varied list.

I do like reading Bill Bryson's observations on the UK. It's interesting reading how Americans (especially an American who lived here for a while) perceive us-beyond the red phone boxes and double decker buses.
And did I mention I am impressed you finished Ulysees?? :)

[sophinisba]

I had to read Great Expectations (and was supposed to read A Tale of Two Cities) for school and have gotten to think of both Dickens and Hardy as authors that people read because they're supposed to and not because they're really that enjoyable, but then I hear things from my f-list, and people choose them as the books they can't live without, so, I should probably give Hardy a try at some point. My mom thinks I would like Tess and she would be one to know. I don't tend to mind grim and it's nice to hear that he's not hard to read.

I got through Ulysses in 2003 by holding my second reading of LotR hostage. That is, I would only let myself read another chapter of Fellowship when I'd finished a chapter of Ulysses (and the chapter explanation from a Cliff's Notes type book). My friends make fun of me not so much for the time I put into it (I was very bored and kind of depressed at the time) but for claiming to have enjoyed it. :) It was an experience anyway.

I will keep the Bryson recommendation in mind.

[claudia603.livejournal.com]

Everyone makes mistakes sometimes. :)

Mistakes are not allowed in LJ-land. I will remember this forever and hold it as a grudge. :D /smartass

[sophinisba]

Argh it was up there for SEVERAL MINUTES! How mortifying! And with mistakes in the HTML too everything got bolded as if I were claiming to have read them all. *hangs head in shame*

[rubynye.livejournal.com]

When I read The Return of the Native I wanted to beat the characters with a rolling pin, but I loved the descriptions of the countryside. So... read Hardy for the travelogue?

[sophinisba]

Eek, descriptions of countryside don't tend to do much for me, but LSR says there's angst so I mean to give him a try. Maybe this summer. (I always say that. I always intend to read The Silmarillion "this summer" too.)

[layne67.livejournal.com]

I highly recommend 15,21,94

59 is rec'd by quite a number of people, I have the book but haven't read it yet.

5 and 73 are great favourites!

[sophinisba]

Did you see this Secret Garden fic from this year's Yuletide? It's nice and gentle and goes very well with the source.

[layne67.livejournal.com]

Oh my. That was a good one. I didn't know they have fanfics on that book. Sure does bring back lots of fond memories. I was 14, I think, when I read that story.

Err, there're aren't any Colin/Dickon slashfics, are there?

[danachan.livejournal.com]

Looking at this has convinced me that I just don't read enough, anymore. (Fanfic doesn't count.) Or maybe I never did; likely, though, I am just being mean to myself.

There are things here that I would like to read.

I would ask you how you managed to get through Ulysses, but I see someone else already asked, so I read that already.

*hugs* I bet you know I miss you!

[sophinisba]

Eh, this list is all over the place. Some books I had to read for school and didn't enjoy much at all, others I had to read and liked, others I decided to read on my own. No Virginia Woolf, no Alice Walker and so many others you'd think people would say were important to them. And some on the list I am just like wtf no I will not waste my time on those! But anyway memes are fun and easy to do (unlike writing omg). *hugses*