3.4 Books

And She Knits, Too posted a book meme. Apparently The Big Read says that, on average, adults have only read six out of the following list. My total is 48, but I'm not sure that it will ever be more than that due to lack of interest in the ones I haven't. On the other hand, I have read, and certainly will continue to read, a few other things.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - Over and over...
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – Over and over...
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Over and over...
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – Yes
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - Yes
6 The Bible –Yes
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - I've tried...
8 1984 - George Orwell - Yes
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - I've tried...
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - Yes
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - Yes
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy – No
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller – No
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – Yes - the plays, not the poetry, and not all of the histories.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - Yes
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - Yes
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - No
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - Yes
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - Yes
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot- Not yet
t21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - Unfortunately
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Unfortunately
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens-Not yet
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - Not yet
25 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Yes
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - No
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - No
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - Not yet
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - No
33 The Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Yes
34 Emma - Jane Austen - Yes
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - Yes
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - Yes - we mentioned the entire Chronicles earlier, why the repeat?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres- No
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - No
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne – Yes
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell -Yes
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Unfortunately
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - Yes
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - Yes, and pretty much everything else as well
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood - Yes
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - No
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - Yes
52 Dune - Frank Herbert- Yes
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Yes
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Yes
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - No
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - No
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - Yes
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck – Yes
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold – No
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Over and over...
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - No
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding - No
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie - No
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - Yes
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - Yes
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Yes
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - Yes
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - No, and don't intend to
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - No
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80 Possession - AS Byatt- No
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Over and over...
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -No
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White - Yes
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - Yes
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Yes
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton – No
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad -No
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – Yes
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - Yes
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - Yes
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - I've tried, repeatedly. I get to the same spot and put it down...
98 Hamlet – Shakespeare – Yes - wouldn't this fall into the complete works listed above?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Yes
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No

On the whole I think they could have improved the list by condensing a few things (why so many individual books by Dickens or Austen?; why Middlemarch and not Silas Marner? why the DaVinci Code and not half a dozen other bestselling nothings?) why not say "anything by..." and add a few more authors to the list?