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Have you stopped by Quinn's blog "Seeing Dreaming Writing" - http://www.seeingdreamingwriting.blogspot.com/? Otherwise I recommend that you do, it is a really great blog with lots of interesting posts. Quinn has just posted a really thought-provoking list from the BBC - according to BBC you are well-read if you have read more than 6 books from this list.
Always up for a review of my
Instructions:
• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
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 King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – 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
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’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 – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci 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’s 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 Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
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
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
So I think I qualify as being well-read :-) But there is still a long way to go if I want to read all of these. And to be honest, I think all of the books on this list deserve to be read! Which ones have you read? And which of them are your favourites?
Thanks for linking back to my blog. You've read a lot of Jane Austen. How was Persuasion? I've actually wanted to read that one for a while, but haven't gotten around to it.
ReplyDeleteI m not sure about this list seen it doing the rounds have read a lot of it but don't know if it makes me well read ,all the best stu
ReplyDeleteI'm super thankful that they include so much Austen; I've read all 6 of her "full" novels so that always helps.
ReplyDeleteYou should also read LOTR, especially if you enjoy the movies.
I also see in your side bar that some of your favorite books are The Count of Monte Cristo, Pride and Prejudice, and Anne of Green Gables-three books that I also love! Nice to see other bloggers who love them.
@Quinn: Persuasion is really good, one of the more "quiet" Austen books yet very beautiful. Thanks for your great blog by the way!
ReplyDelete@Stu: you are definitely well read! One look at your blog telss me that.
@Bookworm: Yes, LOTR in on my TBR. Great to hear that we have similar tastes :-)
It seems I'm also well read. I'm also a litle surprised by some of the books on the list and even more so by some of those not on the list.
ReplyDeleteThanks for posting this, I hadn't seen it before. I seem to have read quite a few books on that list and there are several others I want to read. mine is here: http://abookwormsblog1.blogspot.com/2010/11/lets-read.html
ReplyDeleteI was suprised too, like Petty Witter sagde, at some of the books on and off the list. I think that to be well read is a relative term depending on your interests and why you are reading. It would be a shame to read a lot of things you have no interest in or desire to read just to conform to someone else's idea of what being well read is.
Well I have actually read quite a few of these, although some I read a very long time ago. Do those still count? I think this list is one of the best ones out there.
ReplyDeleteI feel like an idiot. I've only read the harry potter series *shame* I think I tried reading anne of green gables but never finished it. I should really try and read some. hummm
ReplyDelete@PettyWitter: of course you are well-read, that doesn't surprise me :-)
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Sharon and Jenny though, some of the titles there are a bit suprising and I feel that some titles are missing as well.
@Angelic: Please try Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice is a must.
I've posted the list on my blog and I've read 35 of them--some of them the same as yours. Austen alone allowed me to qualify for a "well-read" reader haha I've read everything I can find of hers (juvenilia, incomplete works, etc.)
ReplyDeleteI know one of your favorite novels is Count of Monte Cristo--I was so glad to see it on this list as it is my absolute favorite book!
While I love Harry Potter, it seems a bit out of place on this list. It's not old enough to be a classic, like most of these books. Will it be a classic in the future? Maybe, but it's still out of place (I think)
I definitely qualify as well read, although some of the choices on the list are a bit peculiar. I mean, Mitch Albom and Dan Brown - really?
ReplyDeleteAlso, surely Hamlet forms part of Shakespeare's Complete Works so how come it gets a second mention!
I just put my list up today. I love these.
ReplyDelete