Wednesday, August 5, 2009

How Well Read Are You?

I found this on Tif Talks Books and thought I'd pass it along and found out how well I stacked up.

How well read are you? Well, at least how well read are you as according to the BBC? The BBC believes that most people will have only have read 6 out of the 100 books on the list below. This intrigued me, so I thought I'd see how I stacked up! How do you think you will do? Have you read six or more?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (X)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (X)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (-) (only parts)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (X)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (--)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (X)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (X)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (--)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (--)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier(X)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk (X)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (--)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (X)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (--)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (--)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (--)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame( --)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (X)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma-Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hossein (X)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (--)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (--)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (X)
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (X)
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (X)
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 (X)
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel (--)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (X)
53 Cold Comfort Farm (--)
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth (--)
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (--)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (X)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (--)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon (--)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (--)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt (--)
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (X)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (X)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (X)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (--)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding (X)
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 (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (--)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (--)
76 The Inferno – Dante (--)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (--)
78 Germinal - Emile Zola (--)
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (X)
80 Possession - AS Byatt (X)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (X)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (--)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker (X)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro (--)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (X)
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry (--)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (X)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
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 (X)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (--)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)

I have 55! Not too bad and a lot more than 6! I still have room for improvement. Many of these books are either on my giant pile of books to read or are at least on the list! A few are books I've never heard of (The Wasp Factory?). I'll have to investigate them more. It would be fun to do this with a list for mostly American literature.

12 comments:

  1. Wow I thought I was doing well with 38 read! I know there are some here that I will never read so I'm looking at some thing like 50 yet to read. Better get off the computer and get cracking!

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  2. Wow. You are amazingly well-read. I'm going to do this little feature myself...probably sometime next week when I'm on the road and need an easy post. I can't match your book total, though, I'll say that right up front!

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  3. 55 is very impressive! I'm feeling okay with 30 :)

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  4. I try. . .although I am sad that none of my three book clubs like to read classics that much. My book club when I used to live in Milwaukee was a classics book club and it was fantastic!

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  5. Wow, you're pretty well read! I love lists like this - they remind me of books I should read, or have meant to read, and forgot about. One of my lifetime goals is to fill in the gaps of my classics education.

    I also really like the mix of old and modern classics on this list.

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  6. Da Vinci Code? While a fun read, I'd hardly say it's great literature! Why did they put that one on? I'll have to count again..but it's only like twenty or so! I don't think I'll ever touch Moby Dick...maybe a condensed version where they take out all the talk on blubber processing and whaling.

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  7. I have heard that I MUST read Anne of Green Gables and Little Women from so many people. Would you recommend these ones? Still very impressed with your number!! :)

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  8. Tif, I absolutely loved the Anne of Green Gables series (movies). But have yet to read the books and Little Women is just so excellent! So I definitely recommend them!

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  9. I'd highly recommend the Anne Of Green Gables Series as well as Little Women. In fact, I've read all of L.M. Montgomery's books. I absolutely love her!

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  10. I loved L.M. Montgomery when I was a young teen. I can't wait until my own daughters are a little older and want to read them. I used to make lists of all my favorite girls names from her books and planned to use them when I had kids.

    I also had the pleasure of visiting Louisa May Alcott's house in Concord MA. It was great. The story was very much like her own family.

    You are very well read Laura. An all classics book club sounds wonderful.

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  11. I wish I still had an all classics book club here! I am jealous that you got to visit Louisa May Alcott's house! She is one of my favorite authors. I haven't read all of her works, but a great many as well as some biographies. She was an interesting woman and who can not love Little Women? I also really like An Old-Fashioned Girl.

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  12. Okay, I'm adding Anne of Green Gables and Little Women to my TBR pile!! I've been convinced! Thanks Laura and hmsgofita!! :)

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