posted on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 2:12 AM
by
Endie
Book lists
From Tabula Rasa, my annual meme. Based on some list of 100 popular books (or ones that people pretend that they have enjoyed in order to impress the survey-taker), the point is to bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you loved, italicise the ones you intend to read and strike out the ones you have no intention to read (or to read again, if bolded). However, my blog does not support the deprecated strike-out tags, and I have no intention to mess about with inline css, so I've indicated these with a "[NO]", instead.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling [NO]
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 [NO]
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens [NO]
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare(well, including the sonnets but barring several of the more obscure plays: people who say otherwise are lying!)
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 [NO]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens [NO]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy [NO] (well, I could read bits again, but I'd rather read three other books!)
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 [NO]
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens [NO]
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 [NO]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [NO]
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [NO]
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 [NO]
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 [NO]
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 [NO]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens [NO]
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 [NO]
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [NO]
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 [NO] (I'm a little old...)
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 [NO]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo [NO]
I'm interested by a couple of patterns: I'm pretty widely-read in the "greats", but less so in modern literary works. Thus, I have read all but six of the first thirty. This is largely because of a deliberate decision to read "the canon". There are three books on here that I have never heard of (82, 86 and 95).
I dislike Dickens, as will be aparent from all the "[NO]" tags. I'm also not a huge fan of the wilfully downbeat ending that so delights the ladies, and so The Handmaid’s Tale, Memoirs of a Geisha, Gone With The Wind and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin are all doomed to make one less sale each. And I had to watch a friend, whose opinion I trust, grind her way through A Suitable Boy, and am not at all convinced, from her description, that it is worth the time out of my life needed to read it.
I was already aware that there are weaknesses in my reading, particularly among Russian and French authors, which I am remedying. However, I suspect that TR is right to suspect that this is from the BBC's "Big Read", as English-language books are heavily over-represented.
Finally, I wonder if the list has been a little altered in transmission? Hamlet, for instance, appears at number 98. This despite the appearance of Shakespeare's complete works 80-odd places higher (laughably enough: even I have not read the lot, and I doubt if 0.5% of people have, even in his native country). I suspect that an "official" list would agglomerate such entries.
And no, I have not underlined the Bible, despite my religion. It would be mere duty that made me claim that I enjoyed much of it as a book. Have you ever read Leviticus, after all?