I found this list over on Sara’s blog. I always thought of myself as an avid reader, but this exercise says otherwise! These days, I’d call myself a lazy reader. I tend to read as an escape and for entertainment, but not if much thought is required on my part.
According to some research that Sara did, the National Endowment for the Arts “estimates the average adult has read only six of these” books. Like Sara, there are a few that I’ve never heard of, and a few that I just never could get into reading (she mentioned Dickens, and I wholeheartedly agree!).
Anyway, to do this test:
1. Bold the books you have read
2. Italicize the books you intend to read
3. [Bracket] the books you have viewed via movie, TV or theater
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 - Harper Lee]
6. The Bible
7. [Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte]
8. 1984 – George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11. [Little Women - Louisa May 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 Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
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 Meany – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. [Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery]
47. Far From The Maddening 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
(For someone who detested Dickens, I seem to have suffered through a lot of his books…”blame” that on two teachers in particular, Miss Snyder and Mrs. Whitmer.)
Totals: 32 that I’ve read, one that I intend to read (the book was recently given to us), and 23 that I have viewed.
I checked the National Endowment for the Arts’ website, and they are in the midst of a program called, “The Big Read.” This “is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts, designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” This was developed in response to the NEA’s report, “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America.”
This program began with a list of books, and more books will be added as it goes along. Currently, the books are:
1. Bless Me, Ultima – Rudolfo Anaya
2. My Antonia – Willa Cather
3. A Lesson Before Dying – Ernest J. Gaines
4. A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
5. [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]
6. [The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCuller]
7. [The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck]
8. The Death of Ivan Ilyich – Leo Tolstoy
9. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
10. [The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald]
11. [The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett]
12. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
13. [The Call of the Wild - Jack London]
14. The Shawl – Cynthia Ozick
15. The Joy Luck Club – Amy Tan
16. The Age of Innocence – Edith Wharton
To be added to this list this Autumn are:
17. Washington Square – Henry James
18. A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula LeGuin
19. The Thief and the Dogs – Naguib Mahfouz
20. Housekeeping – Marilynne Robinson
21. [The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain]
22. Old School – Tobias Wolff
I have marked these books as I did the first list. My totals are: 5 read and 7 viewed.
I was just curious about the percentages of how many books I’ve read/viewed from each list, and I had to chuckle a bit.
From the list of 100, I’ve read 32% and viewed 23%.
From the list of 22, I’ve read 23% and viewed 32%.
Interesting.
