25 Nov 2010

Let's read!!


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?

12 comments:

  1. 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.

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  2. I 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

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  3. I'm super thankful that they include so much Austen; I've read all 6 of her "full" novels so that always helps.

    You 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.

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  4. @Quinn: Persuasion is really good, one of the more "quiet" Austen books yet very beautiful. Thanks for your great blog by the way!

    @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 :-)

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  5. 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.

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  6. Thanks 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

    I 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.

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  7. 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.

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  8. I 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

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  9. @PettyWitter: of course you are well-read, that doesn't surprise me :-)

    I 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.

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  10. 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.)

    I 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)

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  11. 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?

    Also, surely Hamlet forms part of Shakespeare's Complete Works so how come it gets a second mention!

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  12. I just put my list up today. I love these.

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