That book meme
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.
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) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
1 Pride and Prejudice- Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien [I hate this stupid story. I’m sorry, everyone I love who loves it. I just don’t GET it. I had to watch the first film at university for “Theology In Film and Literature” and I was like, yeah I get it. Hero gets call, hero says no, something happens, hero goes. Christ analogy. Holy Grail analogy. Etc etc. Plz STFU.]
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling [See above. Do not get]
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible [I haven’t read the entire thing but I have read a lot of it, and I could give passable lectures on it, too. My favourite part? The Gospel of Mark. Oh dude, Mark, whoever you were, you rock my agnostic socks. Oh and St Peter? You’re awesome too!]
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell [I reread this recently for my book club (my mum chose it) and enjoyed it just as much]
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman [I did sort of enjoy this, but I was only about 17 when I read it]
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 [I really enjoyed this, everyone should read it]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks [Chris chose this for our book club and I really liked it, even though it’s horrifying in parts]
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger [Shut up]
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [I have this on my bookshelf so I’ll get round to it sometime]
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 [I think it’s vastly overrated]
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh [Oh god, possibly my favourite book ever. It’s so understated! It’s full of poshos!]
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [This was my choice for our book club, and it was shite]
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 [See this is how to do a Christ analogy properly]
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [I cried when I saw the film]
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 [I should reread this, we did it in Year 9 at school]
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 [Also chosen by Chris for our book club. It’s good, in a satirical kind of way]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon [Also on my bookshelves waiting to be read]
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [It’s shite]
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 [It was one of my GCSE set texts]
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt [I intend to read it because Laura loves it so much]
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [It’s good but her memoir Lucky, which Lovely Bones is kindofsortof based on, is much better]
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac [I read The Perks of Being A Wallflower on holiday, is why]
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding [My mum went to school with her, you know]
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 [I’m a Manics fan, shut up]
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 [Also shite]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [I read it but I didn’t love it]
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 [God god god I swear there was never a book so pointless as this]
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [I just read On The Beach by him for my book club and REALLY enjoyed it. So I think I’m going to see if eBay has this]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl [Worst. Dahl book. Ever]
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I’m actually quite impressed with how many of these I’ve read, and how much my book club has widened my reading 
