Yes my eyesight is now good enough that I can do this one too, like everyone else .....
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)
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 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 (read some loved some)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller'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 - 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 (isn't this cheating)
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 Burnet
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
17 comments:
Hmm - the average is only supposed to have read 6 in the list. I've read the *first* six. Well I always knew I wasn't average :) :)
I thought 6 was pretty sad - since I've read 6 of the first 7!
Exactly! You my sweet are definitely above average in all departments !!!!!
But wasn't there another statistic going around that the average adult, not studying, reads only two books a years.
If so, considering how many books this collective group of friends reads, how many people are there in the demographic polled that don't read a single book ever?
Okay, I'm soooooo not a reader; but I did manage to get 6. Don't ask me if I really remember them though, I'm lucky I remember reading them. lol I found 8 that I was suppose to read......how did I graduate high school?? I have NO idea. lol Call me.........barely average.
Sweetheart - you will always be above average in my eyes!
So which six?
Thank you Mel! :)
I've got #'s 40, 46, 49, 61, 87 and 99. There are a few on the list that I might read with Renee and Ramon; but I'm not huge on reading and usually can only manage a few pages before I become sleepy. :( I think I need to start looking into audio books.
Hey all the good kids books - well at least you had taste in four of the six (I wouldn't call Lord of the Flies a good kids book :))
Hugs
I had to read Lord of the Flies for Novels class in HS. I think my main issue is I read to read; I don't make mental pictures of anything. I read some of those stitching mysteries and as easy of a read that they were, I was able to do a little picturing of things. When I read with the kids I make a point to stop and ask them questions...trying to get them to picture as they read, that's where a lot of the fun comes in I think.
Definitely makes a difference!
When I read I have a mental movie going on in my head and I actually lose the words and the turning of the pages; they fade out and just leave me with my own private mental movie playing along.
That's why I can be reading on the train with tears rolling down my face, or reading at home and look up when the book is finished to realise its dark outside and my legs are all cramped up ....
I find the people that read the most are the people that automatically do the same mental movie thing - so it is great that you are trying to instil that in the kids :) :)
Ramon has finally gotten into reading. He loves Dave Pilkey's Captain Underpants books; that's what really got him into reading. It's got a comic book feel to it without being an actual comic book; so it was a win win for me. Renee on the other hand usually has a book somewhere near her, and it usually has an animal in it. We make a trip to the library here on post at least once a month. It's great entertainment for them and it's wonderful to see them enjoying it. Feel free to send along any good books for 5th and 6th graders to read!! ;)
I'll put this in my own blog, but skimming the list, I think I got to 26, which I'm happy with as I tend not to read the kinds of books that go on these lists.
I can see where that would definitely make a difference. I'm more like Mel in that I've got the movie running in my head while I read. And that's what makes it so hard for me to put certain books down. Good job on working with your kids to picture things, Shawn. I don't quite know how I came to picture things, now that I think of it; I think I've always done it.
And I would say that 6 books for someone who says that they're not a reader is definitely above average! :)
Thanks Paula! It's more of an issue for Ramon, he's more like I was I think. After this posting, I just might have to get one of these books and see if I can get a movie going. lol
I gotta admit I'm like Paula - I have no idea how I got that movie going or even that anyone else did things that way - until I started people :) :)
What I did with Storytime was read out a scene and then get the kids to close their eyes and picture the scene and I would ask them - what colour is your tractor? Are the any clouds in your sky? Get them to flesh out the words and make the pictures more real ....
But I don't remember consciously doing that myself - it just kinda came to me. Its kinda like daydreaming .....
That's pretty much what I do and now that they're older I've gotten into the what do you think will happen next question. Oh the things they can come up with. :) Since we watch movies a lot, I've gotten to the point where I'll do that with them (when Ray's not with me of course), just to see which way they think things will go. Kind of make a game out of it. Which reminds me.......off to see what movies the kids want to see and see who will read the book. lol Ramon has found out that they are usually very different and wants to try and read books before seeing the movie (proud moment there!!!).
Definitely something to be proud of !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
That's great! There are so many movies that make me glad I read the book first. Some of the huge examples are the movies made from the John Grisham books. I'd been reading his books for quite a while before they made the first movie from one. (I forget the title, but it had Julia Roberts in it.) If I hadn't been reading the books, I never would have picked them up. The book was MUCH better than the movie!
And recently, I really regret not reading Memoirs of a Geisha before I saw the movie - I enjoyed the movie, but I LOVED the book, and I think I would have understood a bit more of the movie if I'd have read the book first. I'll be renting it again soon.
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