On another note: Saw this at i hate kit kats a while ago, and decided to try it out. Yes another meme, and another book-related one at that. So sue me! :D
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The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Copy the list, and put an 'x' after those you have read, count 'em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
- The Lord of the Rings ( ) (I tried - twice!)
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) (multiple times, only #7 once so far)
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( )
- The Bible - ( )
- Wuthering Heights ( )
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X) (Does the abridged version in school count?)
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ( )
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( )
- Complete Works of Shakespeare ( )
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
- The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
- Middlemarch - George Eliot ()
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald ( )
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens ()
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X) (twice)
- 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 ( )
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens ( )
- Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ( )
- Emma - Jane Austen ( )
- Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis ( ) [and this is separate from #33 why?]
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
- Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
- Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
- Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
- A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 ( )
- 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) (Again - does the abridged version count?)
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
- Of Mice and Men- John Steinbeck ( )
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov ( )
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt ( )
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas( )
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac ( )
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy ( )
- Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( ) (Couldn't get past the second page!)
- Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X) (Abridged!! Do you see a pattern here?)
- Dracula - Bram Stoker (X) (Children's Illustrated version count?)
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
- Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
- The Inferno – Dante ( )
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
- Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
- Possession - AS Byat ( )
- 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 ()
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven (X) (I do NOT recommend this insipid read!)
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X)
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
- 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 ( ) [and this is separate from #14 why?]
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
So that's 20 for me. How about you?
I have to point out that this list is pretty random - I doubt its origins "from the BBC", and the sloppy entries (Shakespeare and CS Lewis) turn this into a joke.
However, it's amusing for me to look at this list and have absolutely NO desire to even touch many of the works listed. You see, I have this aversion to "classic" "literature": it's a reflexive instinctual reaction developed from childhood, from school, where if you were "good in English" then it was assumed you liked/read classics by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, etc. I very much preferred fantasy, regular fiction and Stephen King; had no patience for the stuffy classics; and knew I was judged lacking by certain peers and teachers. Me being me, I put on my stone face and thick skin and did my own thing.
Of the 20 I have read above, I think I would recommend The Time-Traveler's Wife: it is an excellent read, just make sure you have a box of tissues with you, especially when nearing the end of the book!
Of the remaining 80 above, Possession by A S Byatt has been on my to-read list for about a year. I first heard about her when taking my Fairy Tales class: she has a short story collection of modern / re-written / new fairy tales that were well-written. She comes across as a very articulate writer, and while I'm not a fan of love stories per se, I am very interested in the description of what this book is about. I also have the movie version somewhere on my Netflix queue - we'll see which I get to first! :)
As usual, feel free to tag yourself! Do drop me a comment with a link to your post if you try this out on your own site, k? I'd love to see your own comments to the list.
Cheers!
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