(no subject)

[ceebee_eebee]

Another cool meme and this one isn't even related to fandom. I know! I'm as shocked as you are! I nabbed this one from scribblinlenore

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you hate.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

Two were taken out of the list because they were repetitive.

I am changing the original meme because it said "italicize the books you intend to read" and I have no idea what I intend to read until the moment comes, but there are a lot of the books I was forced to read in school that I actively hate.



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible * (We had to read a bunch of book of the Old Testament in high school and I've read some New Testament as well.)
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'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Ok, so I haven't read them ALL, but close enough.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (I have never hated a book more than I hate this one.)
19. The Time Traveller'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 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
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 Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert (One of my top 5 books of all time.)
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I read them all with my dad when I was little. Makes me all nostalgic just thinking about it).
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

24/98?! Who the hell came up with this list?! There are books on here I've never heard of and I read AVIDLY. Have done so all through school and took a shitload of English classes in college. This list is crap. Most of my favorite classics aren't even listed but they put shit like The DaVinci Code and Life of Pi on here? I'm appalled.


This list of books sucks. So, you know what? I'm making up my own meme. Name your five favorite books you read in school that AREN'T on this list. Mine are:

1. Beloved - Toni Morrison
2. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
3. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
4. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys
5. The Edible Woman - Margaret Atwood

Comments

[scribblinlenore.livejournal.com]

Gulliver's Travels. I didn't think of that! I also could have added Cat's Eye to my list. That's actually my favorite Margaret Atwood novel. So many great books in the world!

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

So many great books in the world!

Right? Those five were just the first ones that popped into my head. The only one of my personal top five favorite books (not ones I read in school) that actually made the cut was Dune.

(The others being Time Enough for Love by Robert Heinlein, Now Wait For Last Year by Philip K. Dick, Ammonite by Nicola Griffith, and...probably The Doomsday Book by Connie Willis. I know, I'm a complete scifi fanatic. I admit it.)

[sheikm.livejournal.com]

No love for Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights?
*is a Brontë geek, sorry*
However, the love for Alice in Wonderland more than makes up for that. *needs to read that again*

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

HAHAHAHA. Yeah, I loooooooooooooathe the Brontes. But it's ok, because I am friends with plenty of Bronte lovers. Don't hold the hate against me! They were just such unrelentingly miserable books and I can't relate to any of the characters. Not even a little. I'm a scifi geek. Old school romance novels...not my ball of wax. But Alice in Wonderland? HELL YES.

[sheikm.livejournal.com]

The Brontës were hardly happy people, so... the miserable books kinda make sense.
It was therapy for people who couldn't afford therapy, I guess... especially if you take their poetry into account, which is largely emo-poetry-before-the-Internet.
I understand when people don't like them, though. Everyone has different tastes... and the majority of my English class hated Wuthering Heights.

Alice in Wonderland is just... brilliant. It's possibly the best piece of absolute nonsense ever written. =D

[airie-fairy.livejournal.com]

I loved Wide Sargasso Sea! Started a bit slow/cryptic, but came together soon enough, I liked the cryptic, it was crushing and really great connection to Jane Eyre (I thought) and it indulged my already existent loathing for Rochester in a way that I can really believe would've been true historically and characteristically and not just because I hate him anyway.

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

The Brontës were hardly happy people, so... the miserable books kinda make sense.

God, yes. Back when I was living in the UK I went and visited their home town and learned all about the deaths and the water source through the graveyard and all that, and honestly? I can't imagine how anyone who survived that experience could have come out of it sane. Just horrific.

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

HEE! Yeah. It actually made Jane Eyre bearable for me. Best fanfiction I ever read.

[airie-fairy.livejournal.com]

Wide Sargasso Sea >>>>>>>>>>>> Jane Eyre. And I like the writing of Jane Eyre, but dear god. How many chapters of directionless angst over a guy who isn't even worth it must there be in something that's supposed to be a "life story"?

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

I really found all the Bronte books to be unrelentingly horrible. Nothing but angst and woe and misery and pining for truly pathetic men while wallowing in masochistic crap. It was all so...blech. But given their life circumstances, I guess I can't blame them. I just wish I hadn't had to read about it.

[julygreen.livejournal.com]

Random person from your f-list popping up to say that I am so with you on the Catcher in the Rye hatred.
Everyone seems to think it is the best thing since sliced bread, but I couldn't stand the bloody book. Thank god someone else feels the same!

I've read about 28 of those. I don't really rate that list either - The Da Vinci Code, what the hell? Dan Brown is the biggest hack writer ever.

[sheikm.livejournal.com]

Haworth had so many deaths that could be linked to that water source. The Brontës' deaths not amongst them, as I seem to remember their water source was from higher up...

And they didn't come out of it sane themselves.
Emily withdrew into herself and effectively committed suicide, Anne had fits of religious mania and Charlotte suffered from terrible depression for much of her life.
...And that's only a small fraction of the things that were weird in that family.

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

There are no random people on my flist! All are encouraged to comment. That's why you're on my flist! :-)

Everyone seems to think it is the best thing since sliced bread, but I couldn't stand the bloody book.

THANK YOU. Holden Caufield is one of the most annoying shitheads to ever appear in literature. The entire book I just wanted to punch him in his face and tell him to SHUT THE FUCK UP WITH THE WHINING. Ugh. Loooooooooathe.

[julygreen.livejournal.com]

Okay cool! =) I sometimes just feel like I'm butting in.

Holden Caulfield is SUCH a whiny tosser. He easily wins my prize for the least likeable fictional character ever. Scarily, many readers apparently relate to him closely. :O

[elyssadc.livejournal.com]

Scarily, many readers apparently relate to him closely. :O

Totally. I am always EXTREMELY suspicious of people who claim to love that book and relate to that character. It's an excellent litmus test.