5 posts tagged “books”
“The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.”
1) Bold: I have read.
2) Underline: Books I love.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog 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 The 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 – Phillip 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 (The advantages of having a mom who studies literature)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
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 (haven't read the whole thing yet)
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
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
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 St. 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
Not quite sure how this list originated, but I did better than I thought
The Indian crowd here might appreciate this more, but here's a book I would love to read. I have always had a fascination for stories from Indian and Greek mythology, and this one, about an heirless king who drinks a potion for his wife and ends you pregnant himself, sounds much too tempting.
Jai Arjun Singh had a great review on his blog, but it seems to have disappeared. Luckily I have it in Google Reader. Here's a section from the review
There’s some healthy irreverence on view: when a messenger arrives with the momentous news that the war is over, no one in the kingdom is particularly interested, being more concerned about internal matters. When the hero Arjuna makes what amounts to a guest appearance and is asked about a story Bhishma narrated to the Pandavas before he died, his reply is a curt, “I’m sorry but I remember no such story. He said so many things” – a neat dismissal of the ponderous Shanti Parva, Bhishma’s long deathbed discourse about a king’s duties.
Hopefully I'll get a chance to read it soon
Book: What book would you like to see made into a movie?
Submitted by Felipe Anuel.
Easy one
The Foundation Trilogy
Book: Share a self-help book that meant a lot to you.
Not really self help, but did a lot for me many years ago
I was tagged to write this list by Arunn. Gosh, this is a difficult question, especially as my reading has veered extensively towards non-fiction material in recent years. Unlike, Arun, I am lucky (or perhaps unlucky) that all my reading is in one language. Makes making lists a little easier. Anyway
One book that changed your life?
This might sound silly, but the book that changed the way I approach like is a little thin one, one that I found
The other, and I am afraid I do not remember the name, is a series, about a couple of kids, Tony and Anne, who ask their father simple questions about nature and get an answer. I was a child when I read that series, but I believe that this series is why I became a scientist.
One book you have read more than once.
Eggs, beans, and crumpets by P. G. Wodehouse. This is one of Wodehouse's finest and I just LOOOOOVE the name. Wodehouse is one of my favorite writers. I love the language, the style, the satire, and to this day I will dial up Wodehouse to make a point from time to time.
One book I would want for a deserted island
I think I would have to go with the Foundation Trilogy. I can read that any time I want to. The perfect mix of science, fiction, an unforgettable character (the Mule) and my favorite quote of all time, "Violence is the last refute of the incompetent" (by Salvor Hardin). It's a statement that I wish others would pay heed to
One book that made you laugh
This is another tough one. Obviously all of Wodehouse's work has made
me laugh. However, I will tip my hat to one of my favorite writers,
Oscar Wilde and one of his best works, The Importance of Being Earnest
I am anything but spiritual, but Nevil Shute has a strange impact on me. Round the Bend is his finest book and has some very poignant moments that made me emotional. Closest I have come to crying.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is another that had a similar impact on me, for totally different reasons
No idea .. I suppose the closest I can come to is the book version of The Usual Suspects. To the best of my knowledge, no real literary version is available.
One book you wish had never been written
So many, but given its historical nature, I would probably choose Mein Kampf. No other book has made me physically sick like this one.
One book you are currently reading
This book is a masterpiece. Max Perutz is a molecular
biologist/structural biologist, whom I have had the pleasure and honor
of meeting. His collections of stories and essays is found in the
book, I Wish I Had Made You Angry Earlier. It's a history of 20th
century science, with personal anecdotes and covers many topics dear to
my heart
One book you've been meaning to read
The End of Medicine by Andy Kessler. The synopsis alone was enough to make be buy it. Now I need to find the time to read it.
