Book List and ranting about said Book List

[rurounihime]

Gacked from Jamie2109, totally. ^__^



NOW. First, a note:

ETA: I am really irked that people took it upon themselves to alter the BBC's original list. No wonder I found this version so untrustworthy. I am going to edit my post eventually in light of the new info.

I am going to be good and only bold the titles that I have completely read (rather than read part of and not finished, even if they were fabulous) or have had read to me in totality. And in the case of things like A Christmas Carol, I am not counting having seen the play, but rather having read the actual book.

I'm going to italicize the ones I have read most (or much) of/have had most read to me, etc.

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
6. The Bible (or bits of it, anyway)
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
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler'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
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's 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

Sha-BAM. *grins wildly* 24 read in completion, 6 more in partial. And I own several of the others, but haven't read them yet.

And may I ask where they get off offering only snippets of the Bible as a choice while including ALL of Shakespeare (which means the sonnets, long poems, and plays, all you naysayers) and ALL of Sherlock Holmes (which includes several novels and NUMEROUS short stories)?? What the fudge? *shakes head*

As for my personal faves:

Number 72 gets a major shout out here. It surprised me with how truly frightening a novel it was, and remains one of my favorite vampire stories ever. Also, you can't call yourself a vampire fan until you've read this one. Sorry.

Number 94 also gets props for being incredibly gripping, for being incredibly well-written, and for being about bunnies yet not being a kids' book in the slightest. I've read it twice. I love it.

And of course, I could not post this list without stating that number 49 is my absolute FAVORITE book ever. Wow. It's the best book I've ever read. I've read it at least three times, possibly four.

Another Bunch O' Gripe Because I Feel Like It: They include Harry Potter and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and yet there is no mention of The Witch of Blackbird Pond. *frown* Also: Hamlet but no Romeo and Juliet? No Macbeth? No Midsummer Night's Dream? Dude, if we are going to make an exception of Hamlet, we might as well lengthen the list and make an exception of the other plays, and hey, why not of the individual Sherlock Holmes novels while we're at it? Why not say "Everything by Jane Austen"? Where's Toni Morrison? And what the heck is with the Narnia Chronicles in full followed right away by LW&W? This list is shifty. I don't think I like it.

On a less crazy note, read Catch-22. Read it. I've never laughed so hard in my life. ^__^

Comments

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

i was surprised to even see the bible on there. i mean, it might be an influential book, but i don't exactly think of it as "literature." and who reads the bible for entertainment value??

i've never read most of the books on the list, and there are maybe three i can say i genuinely like [lotr, hp, and dune]. i've always been glad that i was spared the lord of the flies in high school, hahaha.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Wow, I can't believe you don't like LotF. It's fantastic. The characterisation is really uniquely done and the message is truly sobering, if not frightening. The descriptions are CRAZY good.

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

well,i haven't read it so i don't know if i'd like it or not. but the basic plot does not intrigue me and from what i've heard, it's also very depressing so i have no desire to read it.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Well, it IS about the degeneration of "civilized" society... ^__^

But the imagery is fabulous, not to mention the unique writing style.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Oh, also, I guess you can consider the Bible literature because it is one of the biggest collection of stories in the world. Also, there are literature studies classes on it all over (not studied as a religious text but rather as a literary work).

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

i suppose :P. i guess i haven't read any part of the bible that i found remotely interesting. the parts i had to read in school or had to listen to in church were either boring or moralizing or both, haha. it's not exactly what i'd call gripping.

[siriuslydlucius.livejournal.com]

I am not a huge proponent of reading the bible, but you should try reading the story of David and Bathsheba.

That is one they will NEVER read you in church. Heh...

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Heh, then I've got to check it out, definitely! And yeah, methinks there are a lot of stories in the Bible that don't get read aloud in church.

[snottygrrl.livejournal.com]

the bible wasn't on the original bbc list. check out my latest post if you want to see additions and deletions.

[coffeejunkii.livejournal.com]

ha! that doesn't surprise me at all. after all, we're all heathens in europe ;). o r at least don't care about the bible as much mas americans do, on average.

[azamir.livejournal.com]

bible for entertainment value? WHAT ELSE IS THERE? I've read the apocalypse, and it was FUN, because it's just one big extasy trip in description. dunno who really can take stuff like that serious anymore in our times. seriously, the whole bible is full of 2000-4000 year old behaviour rules. you should only read it for entertainment purposes, because to take it seriously in its very own wordage would get you to conlusions that are the same as those of muslim fundamentalists. especially in the old testament. (god, I'm so full of shit after 13 years of catholic religious education... never wanna hear a word about jesus again...)

[caitlen.livejournal.com]

It's not actually the original list. The Originally BBC Big Read list can be found <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/</a> here. The Bible isn't on it, for example.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the link! I need to go and fix my post...

[bluelittlepig.livejournal.com]

Well, the list as I understand was created from the result of some poll of the public's favorite books. It's just a list of the top 100 favorite books of those that took the poll, which is why some books were not on the list.

Surprisingly, I read more of the books on the list than I thought I would have. I'll have to go through it closely to see how many I did read.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

I guess I'd like to see what the big list looked like then, the one people had to choose from. ^__^

[potterotic.livejournal.com]

I just got the Lord of the Flies Audiobook to listen to this weekend. I've never read it but if it's your favorite then I'm betting I'll like it. Thanks.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Oh, I hope you like it. It really captivated me right from the moment I was introduced to it. Analyzing it is very intriguing, particularly if you look at each boy as a metaphor for a particular aspect of humanity (or lack thereof).

But really, the story is just plain good, sans analysis. ^___^

[snottygrrl.livejournal.com]

you know i've guessed since the first time i saw this meme that someone had been editing the list. i finally went and looked at it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/bigread/top100.shtml) as suspected, none of the 'groups' are on there, nor the bible, nor any shakespeare. there are more hp books and only lion witch of narnia. [*shrugs*]

[*scurries back to doing actual work*]

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

GAH!

*is infuriated*

Durn them tampering people... *fumes*

I will obviously be editing my post to correct this. *lots of glaring going on over here*

[snottygrrl.livejournal.com]

if your curious about the differences, i've made a list of what was added and what was taken out (only i think i missed one or the other somewhere because my numbers don't quite rationalise). there are about 40 changes to the original list (http://snottygrrl.livejournal.com/282427.html#cutid1).

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Thank you (belatedly) for the link! I'll go check it out. ^__^

[frantic-mice.livejournal.com]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <3

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Aww, thank you! Hahaha, I still have a few more hours over here. Time zones crack me up. In a sense, birthdays go on for about... two days all over the world. ^__^

[dana-aeryn.livejournal.com]

I did the same meme over at my lj. Happy Birthday. I hope you have a wonderful day. The arrangement series is great as always. I love reading new parts.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

Very belatedly: Thank you for the birthday wishes! I had a nice transition from one age to the next, thanks to you guys. ^___^

And as soon as all these holiday fests are over, I hope to be working on more Arrangement. Sorry for the wait!

[roastchicken.livejournal.com]

Happy birthday! ♥

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

SO belatedly: Thank you so much for the birthday wishes! I had a very nice day. I hope youa doing well!

[shoeboxer4life.livejournal.com]

I hear ya on the Morrison. And no Kingsolver! Aack. This makes my head explode.

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

I do have to admit to never having read any Kingsolver. But my mum loves her books. ^__^ I may have to pick one up and see what the fuss is all about.

[fresica.livejournal.com]

I thought it was weird that they would put Chronicles of Narnia and Complete Shakespeare, then single out one book/work from those collections. I mean, surely they didn't run out of classics, right? I may not be a fan, but Toni Morrison totally belongs on the list somewhere. And what about Oscar Wilde? I mean, come on! The man was a cultural phenomenon!

*ahem* Okay, my rant is over... sorry... :P

[rurounihime.livejournal.com]

I guess the list got totally jacked up by random people... *is still irked* And I agree with you about Morrison, and WILDE OMG. WHERE IS DORIAN GRAY????

[fresica.livejournal.com]

Srsly. Dorian Gray deserves a spot on every reading list in existence. I get a little irritated every time I read this list through... ^^;

[fireelemental79.livejournal.com]

You know, I actually took a class where I read the Bible as literature. I wonder if I've read more of it because of that than you have. I liked the Pslams the best. We did skip over any begetting and the dos and dont'ts of eating though. I mean, there's just so much you can stretch the term "literature."