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.
- Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
- Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
- Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
- His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
- Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
- Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read some-not all)
- Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye – JD 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
- Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
- Emma – Jane Austen
- Persuasion – Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
- The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
- Winnie the Pooh – AA 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 – LM 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
- 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 – AS 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 – EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
- 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
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
- 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!
Here’s something exceedingly weird …..
On your blog, the link back to People’s Republic is correct:
http://www.stagg.hk/?p=147
But in the RSS feed, via Google Reader, the link shows up like this:
http://www.hkstagg.com/
?????????
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?
Seen, read them all.
Just noticed your ‘day in history’
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
Literature is news that stays news.