World Book Day

[pegkerr]

Gacked from kiwiria:

Apparently, today is yesterday was World Book Day in the UK.

To mark the tenth anniversary of World Book Day, a survey has been conducted to find the ten books the nation cannot live without. Over 2000 people voted online, which resulted in the following top 100.

I'm bolding the ones I've read and italicizing the ones I'd like to read.


1. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen [duh]
2. Lord of the Rings, The, JRR Tolkien [ditto]
3. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter Series, JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
6. Bible
7. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four, George Orwell
8. 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, William Shakespeare I'm not sure I've read them all, but I've read most. I was in a Shakespeare reading group that met for several years and have many of the plays aloud, several times.
15. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
19. The Time Travellers Wife, Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch, George Eliot
21. Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald F Scott
23. Bleak House, Charles Dickens reading it now
24. War and Peace, L.N Tolstoy This might be another one I'd try through Daily Lit.
25. The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky [tried it, couldn't finish]
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, C.S Lewis (why is this on here twice?)
34. Emma, Jane Austen
35. Persuasion, Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, C.S.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, A A 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 Madden 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, Vikrem 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 Sort of. I skimmed it in a bookstore
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 Reading it now, through Daily Lit
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, Emil Zola
79. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession, A S 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, E.B. White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven, Mitch Alborn
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, Alexander Dumas
98. Hamlet, William Shakespeare (this one is on here twice too...)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

I've read fifty-eight (sort of; some of them are on there twice).

Comments

[pinguthegreek.livejournal.com]

Actually, Book Day was yesterday. The Little Prince is a wonderful, wonderful book, it always gets to me. Also, I'd love your take on The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, Mark Haddon and
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, they're both really good reads.

Oh and I can't let this list go without telling you that Time Traveler's Wife is my favourite book ever !

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

I clock in at a respectable 54, though I also counted the ones I started but didn't finish. (Hey, it's better than not starting at all!)

The idea of a weekly Shakespeare reading group sounds *amazing.* I'd love to be a part of one of those. And am in fact going to look around and see what I can find.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh, it was amazing. It was fabulous. We met every other Friday for years. Someone would host, and there would be wonderful food--exotic cheeses and hummus and cakes and gingerbread, coffee and tea. We would hand out the parts and read, generally breaking for more food about halfway through the third act. pameladean, eileenlufkin carbonel and elisem and daedala and fgherman and Lois McMaster Bujold and Raphael Carter and Patricia Wrede and Mike Ford (John M. Ford). Much laughter always resulted.

Those were some of the happiest evenings of my life.

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

That is amazing!!!!!!!!! I'm sort of slavering, it just sounds so intimate and wonderful and inspiring. Did the evenings end or did you move? Was this in Minnesota? (And is your area sort of coincidentally blessed with that many great writers in one place, or did you all just decide you would become amazing together?)

Sorry, this just has me bursting with questions now!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

This was in Minnesota, yes. Minneapolis/St. Paul is really an extraordinary community for writers and creative people. We have many theaters and colleges, and bookstores, and that all helps. The Shakespeare reading group, as I said, lasted for years. We would occasionally read plays by other writers. I remember doing quite a bit of Tom Stoppard. But we always came back to Shakespeare.

Why not start one yourself? We would generally have six to ten people. Good food is important. You can always have people reading two to four parts. Literary people who are good readers, who love to laugh, who don't mind throwing themselves into the part, trying an accent, etc. Try your friends, or if you are looking for strangers to join in who might become friends, try putting up signs at a bookstore or college. If you try it, let me know how it goes! Start with one of the comedies, maybe--As You Like It or Twelfth Night or Midsummer Night's Dream are good for breaking the ice as your group gets going.

[bookshop.livejournal.com]

Hahaha. Good food is always important.

This seriously sounds so amazing. philalethia's already said she would love to come! Any suggestions on the kind of location to use? Did you just rotate meeting at people's houses? I think a generally college age group may mean we need to meet on campus somewhere.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Oh, yes, we just met in people's homes. That made it comfortable and fun. The types of people we were, the homes were always old, and crammed full of books and odd, dusty furniture. There were usually cats around (and I always had to take my allergy pills before going to meetings, because, tragedy of my life, tho' I adore cats, I am deathly allergic). We would meet in the living room--enough seating for everyone, with coffee tables for putting your food and drinks. That's all you need. We wouldn't assign the parts until the night of the meeting itself. At the end of the evening, we'd decide what we'd read next time.

Do let me know how it goes if you try it!

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

Another tip: it helps if the person who assigns the parts has at least read the play in advance. That way, he/she knows which parts are best to double, so that a reader does not have to read for long stretches two characters who are talking to each other (i.e., the reader is, essentially, talking to himself/herself).

[carbonel]

And Kara Dalkey, who did great voices.

[pegkerr.livejournal.com]

*laughs* Did she ever!

[fgherman.livejournal.com]

I've got a measly 32, but I'm not counting the ones I started but didn't finish.

The play reading group was amazing - I'd be up for starting it back up again. I joined when we moved to Minneapolis back in 1987.

[slrose.livejournal.com]

I've read thirty eight that I know for sure, and there were about another dozen that I may have read, but don't remember for sure.

I think you would like Cold Comfort Farm.

[blpurdom.livejournal.com]

#47 should be "Far from the Madding Crowd" not "Madden Crowd". (Maybe this is an update that has something to do with John Madden?)

Some of the books at the top strike me as, "Are you KIDDING?" I could definitely live without Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights and Great Expectations. OTOH, I've been meaning to read #19, The Time Traveller's Wife (the apostrophe is missing) because everyone I know who's read it loves it to pieces.

Most of the rest that I'm familiar with or have read struck me as just fine until I got down to #63, The Secret History. I hated that book after just a couple of chapters (actually, I hated every character in it and didn't want to subject myself to more of their presence in my head). #64 is something my daughter read and didn't like (The Lovely Bones). Bad writing, she said. (She's very picky.) And I'm sorry, but NO ONE needs Jude the Obscure unless they're a masochist. I loved Tess but wanted to tell off Hardy from beyond the grave for writing Jude.

I've only read 48 of them, but 5, 19, 62, 96 and 100 are things I'm planning to read soon.