The Rabid Paladin found an article in The Guardian describing how the list was compiled from a poll where 2,000 people responded naming the ten books they couldn’t live without, and the list matches the meme list. Oh, and the numbers are the ranks of the books. The common phrase associated with this meme, “According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on this list,” doesn’t appear to have any basis in fact.
But all that research doesn’t make the meme any less fun, so here it is for me with these instructions:
- Boldface those you have read.
- Italicize those you intend to read. (For me, only those on my to-read list.)
- Put an asterisk by the books you LOVE. (It was originally “underline,” but I’m going with mine.)
- Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings — J.R.R. Tolkien**
- Jane Eyre — Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series — J.K. Rowling**
- To Kill a Mockingbird — Harper Lee**
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights — Emily Bronte**
- 1984 — George Orwell
- His Dark Materials — Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations — Charles Dickens
- Little Women — Louisa May Alcott**
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles — Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 — Joseph Heller
- The Complete Works of Shakespeare [The complete works? On one line?]
- Rebecca — Daphne Du Maurier**
- The Hobbit — J.R.R. Tolkien*****
- Birdsong — Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye — J.D. Salinger
- The Time Traveller’s Wife — Audrey Niffenegger
- 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**
- Brideshead Revisited — Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath — John Steinbeck
- Alice in Wonderland — Lewis Carroll**
- The Wind in the Willows — Kenneth Grahame**
- Anna Karenina — Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield — Charles Dickens
- The Chronicles of Narnia — C.S. Lewis
- Emma — Jane Austen
- Persuasion — Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe — C.S. Lewis [Okay, part of “The Chronicles of Narnia”?]
- The Kite Runner — Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin — Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha — Arthur Golden**
- Winnie the Pooh — A.A. Milne****
- Animal Farm — George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code — Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude — Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney — John Irving
- The Woman in White — Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables — L.M. 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
- Dune — Frank Herbert
- 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
- Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time — Mark Haddon**
- 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
- The Count of Monte Cristo — Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road — Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure — Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones’ Diary — Helen Fielding****
- Midnight’s Children — Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick — Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist — Charles Dickens
- Dracula — Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden — Frances Hodgson Burnett
- Notes From A Small Island — Bill Bryson
- Ulysses — James Joyce
- The Bell Jar — Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons — Arthur Ransome
- Germinal — Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair — William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession — A.S. Byatt
- 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 — E.B. White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven — Mitch Albom
- The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes — Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection — Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness — Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince — Antoine De Saint-Exupery**
- The Wasp Factory — Iain Banks
- Watership Down — Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces — John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice — Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers — Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet — William Shakespeare [Um, covered in “Complete works of Shakespeare”?]
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory — Roald Dahl
- Les Misérables — Victor Hugo
So, 45. Though I think if I can get a whole book credit for The Little Prince, getting only one for the complete works of Shakepeare kind of sucks. Okay, and I’ve just decided this minute that since two titles were repeated — “Shakepeare”/Hamlet and “Narnia”/The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe — I can put in two titles of my choosing from children’s literature. Hmmm. I’m going with Tom Sawyer/The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, for number 98... and how about Holes, by Louis Sachar, for number 36. Great, now I’m up to 47.
So if I take out Heart of Darkness and replace it with Poisonwood Bible — both Africa — and change Cloud Atlas to Atlas Shrugged — both with “Atlas” — I’m at 49. And to make it halfway through the list, we need only change The Bell Jar to Who Took the Cookies from the Cookie Jar? All right, 50 it is!
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