100 books meme

[jenett]

Which is making the rounds again at a point when it amuses me to do it. You will probably fail to be surprised I've read a bunch of these, though you might be surprised which ones.

According to the meme, if you've read more than 7, you are above the average. (Abridged versions don't count, neither do other media forms, for the purpose of this meme)

Bold the ones you've read, italics for the ones you've partly read.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. Rowling (I haven't read book 7 though I own it and know what happens in it)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I think I have actually read it all at this point.)
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'Ubervilles - 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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (comfort reading! Yes, I'm weird.)
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 (failed list! Why is this here right below 36?)
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 - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 Madam 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 (in two languages!)
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

I've read 50 in total (8 of which I read for school, and would probably not have read on my own: I did read the Dante entirely for school, but had already read a bunch of it on my own.) Several of the 13 italic ones I've read in abridged versions (Dumas, Hugo, Dickens).

Comments

[keshwyn]

29 in entirety, plus I've read a number of things by the authors on this list that *aren't* on the list. I'd say, "I should read more of these," except that I've also started a number of them and put them down because I keep wanting to grab the protagonists, drag them out the back door, and dunk them repeatedly in the horse trough until they stop being complete IDIOTS.

Also, I refuse to read the DaVinci code on general principle.

[jenett]

Also, I refuse to read the DaVinci code on general principle.

This, alas, is where being a librarian means sometimes sacrificing brain cells for the cause. Or something. (Mostly, I looked at how much he'd pillaged from Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and amused myself predicting the next scene.

(That's also the reason I've read _The Five People You Meet In Heaven_ which needs to be torn apart for its lousy and really inconsistent cosmology by someone with more time than I have.)

[jportela]

Dan Brown is the only English author that I can read in Portuguese translations. It's actually enjoyable enough to read once.

[elf]

6 books by Dickens. 4 by Jane Austen. 3 by Thomas Hardy. 6 more authors with two books, even skipping Lion Witch & Wardrobe/Chronicles of Narnia and Complete Works of Shakespeare/Hamlet combinations.

Jane Austen is the only female author with more than one book on the list.

I've read 25 completely, and have a small handful of partial reads. (The bible, which I never finished; I've read about half the OT and all the NT. Shakespeare's works. Sherlock Holmes. Ulysses.)

While I like list games, and book memes, I very much don't like this list, which I've seen go around before--it implies, without directly stating, "A well-read person is has read lots and lots of books by White males." (WTF is Dan Brown doing on this list? His Holy Blood, Holy Grail fanfic is not real literature. It's noteworthy for the church's reactions to it, not for the actual content of the book.)

[jenett]

It is not a very good list, nope. It still bemuses me to see the patterns, though.

[jportela]

You can still find around 80 books that are good in that list, from something coming from the Internet that's actually pretty good.

[ethaisa]

Yup - I'm waiting for the other list-memes that spring up off of this one in protest. (I'm half tempted to do one myself, would time permit.)

What interests me is who compiles these things in the first place, and why do I feel this almost compulsive need to consider them? :p

[elf]

I remembered hearing the list had something to do with LibraryThing's rankings; something like "100 most-rated books."

*google*

::notes that librarything is *very* unfriendly to dialup::

Aha!
BBC List of 100 books One Should Read (More accurately, BBC's The Big Read - Top 100 Books: "In April 2003 the BBC's Big Read began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books." (I linked to the blog post first because the BBC post is split into two pages.)

I'd like the meme better if it used this list: Newsweek's Top 100 Books: Newsweek's "Top 100 Books: The Meta-List," published in June 2009, "crunched the numbers from 10 top books lists (Modern Library, the New York Public Library, St. John's College reading list, Oprah's, and more) to come up with The Top 100 Books of All Time." It's still biased, but it's not as weirdly skewed, and doesn't include both collections & individual books.

[yvi]

BBC List of 100 books One Should Read (More accurately, BBC's The Big Read - Top 100 Books: "In April 2003 the BBC's Big Read began the search for the nation's best-loved novel, and we asked you to nominate your favourite books."

Actually, no, that's a different list. This one is from 2007 and the one this meme is based on: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news

[elf]

Oops; sorry! Didn't look far enough.

And wow. No explanation whatsoever there. Just, "here are the top 100 books;" no mention of whose or why. (And I wonder where that "average person has read only 7 of these" concept comes from.)

[yvi]

Oh, this was actually linked from this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2007/mar/01/topstories3.books news story, so there is at least some context.

[ethaisa]

Interesting! Thanks; the Newsweek list does seem to be an improvement.

[kaptainvon]

33 finished, including The Da Vinci Code (or Foucault's Pendulum For Dummies, as I like to call it). 5 more started at some point or another. I'd be ashamed but the thing is, I don't actually like Austen's writing all that much, and while I love Dickens I seem to have enormous trouble finishing any of them, and The Wasp Factory is far outclassed by anything Banks wrote since, and basically I should be fired out of the literary canon forthwith.

[jportela]

I recently started reading Dickens and I believe I suffer the same problem as you. Although I enjoy it, I hardly can read more than one chapter per reading session. Considering "The Pickwick Papers" has more than 50 chapters, finishing it could be a problem.

[syzygis]

The last time I did this (and I believe it was the same list), I seem to remember the description attached to it had something to do with "best-selling literature of all time." Which means the list is simply a record of what titles booksellers have the highest numbers for. At which point, having duplicates (entire series vs. single volumes in that series) becomes more understandable, at least from the bookseller perspective. Repurposing it, not so much.

(Of course, I found this out by posting a rant about the duplicates and having a friend point out the reasoning to me.)

[jportela]

That's actually a very good list for something coming from the Internet ;)

I've read only 11 books of those (not something I'm proud of). That means I still have 89 to read (the fun!).

Check my journal if you want to see which ones I read: http://jportela.dreamwidth.org/1186.html

[walk_of_the_fallen]

Seriously, SEVEN is average? Holy cats.

Do I get to act seriously hoity toity now? I've read 48 1/2 (not quite through ALL of Shakespeare) that I am reasonably sure of....tho' details of some escape me now. And seriously, The Da Vinci code made this list? Ye Gods.

[wild_irises]

I wouldn't necessarily believe the "seven is average" line; I expect someone pulled it out of their posterior. Also, is one averaging across all people, including those who never read a book, or all people with some minimum level of education, or all people including those who don't read English, or what?

[walk_of_the_fallen]

That would make more sense, but at the same time it makes you wonder just what the limits of their "average" really was?
After all, were I to compare a list of books, I don't think I'd average in people who do not read at all.

[velvetpage]

I've read thirty-eight, including most of the ones that are actually series of books, and counting four that I read in French (Les Mis, Le Petit Prince, Madame Bovary, Les Trois Mousketaires.) There are two dozen more that I really need to read, most of which I know quite a bit about.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I found To Kill a Mockingbird and Possession quite worth my time, and you might, too.

I have A Town Like Alice on my pile. We'll see.

[jenett]

[school]'s copy of Possession came on spring break with me, but I did not yet have the brains for it. I intend to try again in a few months. (People keep telling me I'd like it, and I am willing enough to try so.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

Possession is great because it's a research adventure, as well as having a lot of good 19th-century-knockoff poetry in it, and a really strong story that's unearthed in pieces. It's one of my favorite books.

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I LOVED Cloud Atlas, and I second the Possession rec too.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I loved Possession and Vanity Fair. Germinal and Grapes of Wrath are both rabble-rousing stories of evil robber barons and heroic yet doomed efforts to change the world. I liked Anna Karenina better than Madame Bovary, but Jane Eyre is best of all.

[jenett]

I so am not a Bronte fangirl. (I once had to read Wuthering Heights three times inside of a year for school - summer reading, class reading in more depth, and then class reading again when I went to boarding school, which might have had something to do with it.) I liked _Jane Eyre_ quite a lot more, but not enough to want to read it again any time soon.

Vanity Fair should probably make it onto a reading pile sometime (I've seen the movie)

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I *hated* Wuthering Heights. I wanted to smack every single character in it. Thackeray's narrator is so very full of snark that I had to stop and snicker every few pages. (I also adore _The Rose and the Ring_, but you have to look hard to find a copy with the author's illustrations. The text alone is not what Thackeray wanted.)

[marydell.livejournal.com]

You and I are opposite! I love Wuthering Heights and hate Jane Eyre. I wonder if that is one of those things like algebra vs. geometry--people who like one tend to dislike the other.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

What an interesting thought--it wouldn't surprise me at all. Have you read Villette? It's been recommended to me by several people, but I haven't yet gotten around to it.

[aislingthebard.livejournal.com]

What in the world does Thackeray have to do with Wuthering Heights? It's by Emily Bronte.

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I do most humbly beg your pardon. I neglected to start a new paragraph when going from one book I had mentioned to another.

[hobbitbabe.livejournal.com]

One of the weird things about this list is the big gap between the "old" stuff and the "new" stuff. It seems to me that there's hardly anything published in the 1960s through 1980s on the list. Watership Down, A Prayer for Owen Meany which I believe is misspelled in your list, that may be it.

Oh, and I think I've read 30 cover-to-cover.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

66.

You're so lucky not having read all of Austen. I'd make them last if I were you.

[openhands.livejournal.com]

May I just ask, what is the purpose of an abridged book? I've been offered the option before and can't think of any discernable reason to choose a shortened version of something I wanted to read.

[jenett]

Have you ever read Les Miserables? There is a whole lot of stuff in there that ... well, doesn't do much of anything. The abridged version takes all of that out. (I've read the complete abridged, in that case, and enough of the unabridged to realise why the abridged exists. There's a whole lot of "Back in the direness of the Napoleonic Wars, X and Y were miserable" which, once you've read one bit of it, you can basically insert in all future mentions.)

I think it also depends on what you're reading the book for: if you want to follow character or story, abridgements sometimes make that easier to do. I'm not generally hugely fond of them, but for stuff from the era of 'paid by the word', I think they've got some uses.

[brock-tn.livejournal.com]

And in some cases, the abridged version is a better story. The classic example is "The Man in the Iron Mask," which is buried in an immense novel by Dumas pere: The Vicomte de Bragelonne, or Ten Years Later. Much of the first two thirds of this 268-chapter behemoth are concerned with the transformation of Louis XIV from a weak boy king into the Sun King, with subplots about the Stuart Restoration in England and one of Louis many mistresses. It is only the last third that really produces an adventure novel comparable to Dumas' earlier volume, The Three Musketeers.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

66. Of those that I've read and you haven't, I'd most recommend A Prayer for Owen Meany.

[loreleyjacob.livejournal.com]

Hmm. I counted 43. Not bad, given this is a somewhat culturally biased list.. Life of Pi is totally worth your time, IMHO.