Friday, January 22, 2010

Are you a stupid American?

I stole the list below from my friend Koseli's blog (unfortunately it is private or I would send you there. She is very talented.). I wanted to know how all of my friends and family measure up. I have marked how I measure up after each book.

"The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?”

*The BBC just loves ridiculous Americans. Of course they would claim something that would make us look lazy and stupid. Ha! I want to know how they came up with this particular list of books? Who's the authority that said The Five People You Meet in Heaven should be on here? HUH?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X


2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X

6 The Bible X

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (almost, but no, not everything)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Been meaning to get to this one)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot



21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X (Thank you Clarissa for recommending this, I loved it)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Another one I've been meaning to get to)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (I own it, but have not yet read it.)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky X

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (only read half. I really don't like Steinbeck much. Don't hate me Tabor.)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy X

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X

34 Emma - Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen X

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini X

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 X

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X (could have lived without this one)

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 X

47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X



51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X
52 Dune - Frank Herbert

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (I have started this one at least 10 times but never finished)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck X

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X (creepy, Mom, don't read this one, you won't like it)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (own it, just haven't gotten to it yet)

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 (I started this when I was in high school but never got the courage to finish. I need to try again)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X

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 X

80 Possession X

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 X

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams X

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 X

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo X ( one of my favorites)

4 comments:

Marshall said...

I've read 18. A lot of those books are on my list of to read though.

Melanee said...

I'm with you on that. The problem is that the listkeeps growing.

Camille said...

I stopped counting after I got to 20 at number 36, that means I'm awesome, right?

Olivia Cobian said...

Edgar and I have been watching the BBC's Bleak House. It is gripping. I wish I'd read the book first. Yes, Camille, you are awesome, and not just because you're well-read!