Far East Cynic

A meme about books……

From the friendly residents of the People’s Republic of Tung Chung, who live where I wish I was living-a mere 20 minutes by train from one of my two favorite spots on the planet-and very near the world’s best airport.

“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”

And so here’s the list, complete with the following instructions:

  • Look at the list and embolden those you have read.
  • Italicise those you intend to read.
  • Underline the books you LOVE.
  • Reprint this list in your own blog.
  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
  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 (I’ve read some-not all)
  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
  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 Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
  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-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’ 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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
  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. 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
  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
  100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

As Richard says,” it is obviously very subjective”-and it lacks some of the really great non-fiction books out there, “and strangely redundant in places (the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet? The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe? But no Screwtape Letters? Who compiled this list?!), but it’s an interesting metric nonetheless. If any of my readers reprint this in their own blogs, do post a link in the comments section here! ”

Like he said, do the list yourself and trackback here!

  1. You know what happened? I orginally had the second link in the post. As I try to do, I look at the “smooth” post and test the links and found it was wrong. So I changed the post. I would have thought it would up date the RSS but maybe it takes time.

    So which ones have you read?

  2. Have read some, certainly not all. My tastes tend toward history , hard science and science fiction; not much of that on this list. Not a single Greek or Roman novel made it? The Iliad? Of course, settling on a list that’s universally acclaimed is impossible, but to leave off the entire ancient world seems an oversight. Also, the Orient has a scanty showing here.

  3. Somewhat objective list as stated, missing some good books. Read some, about a third, some on the list have no intention of reading. Whats amazing is that the average person has only read an average of 6 of them. I will bet money that those are the “high school” readings that they think they read, yet don’t remember one iota.

    claudio

  4. A lot of those books were books I had to read in High School. I was blessed though , to attend advance placement English and attend a college that required two years of English no matter what your major was. A year of which had to be a study of Major British Writers. ( The foundation of any American education IMHO).

    Too many folks I saw in previous years-graduates of great American universities-could not write well.

    They knew how much money was in their 401K’s though.

  5. I was thinking about responding to this in kind, but I was (like others) disappointed by the randomness with which this list caromed through literary history. I’ve read a good number of these works, some in high school, some before, some after. What I am principally annoyed by is the lack of Heinlein (surely “Stranger in a Strange Land” or “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” belonged on there someplace), Asimov, Clarke, and others.

    Even P.K. Dick (“Man in the High Castle”, anyone?), Gibson, or Stephenson, but those might be a little too niche for people anyway. Also, we’re eschewing Ayn Rand for Harry Potter when Sylvia Plath (I’ve read Bell Jar) made the list? Eh?

    To Skippy: don’t bother with Brideshead Revisited. Waugh’s language is so pretentious as to defy description and as a result it took me six months to work my way through this one. I much preferred Ford Maddox Ford’s “Good Soldier”, not to mention James Hilton’s “Lost Horizon” and “Random Harvest.”

    Furthermore, Siegfried Sassoon’s “Complete Memoirs of George Sherston” whips the snot out of anything Waugh ever wrote.

  6. Lost Horizon is good.

    And I agree with you-the list is arbitrary-but with books its tough to get all the good ones. I’m glad I grew up a reader!