So Many Books, So Little Time

I picked up this meme from Lisa from Texas. How many books have you read from this list? Post on your blog and let me know.

The National Endowment for the Arts believes that the average American has read only 6 of the books on the list below.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your 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 — I started first book, a little too fantasy for me)
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling — I have read Books 1and 2, started, but never finished Book 3
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible — I was in catholic school for 9 years, so read most of the New Testament, not the Old testament, though.
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 — have read many Shakespeare plays as I was an English major, with a drama minor
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 — read first 3 books
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 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 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
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

I have read 56 books from the list of 100. Many more to go. Now that my children are getting older, and at times less demanding, I have more time to read. I read more this summer than in the past couple of summers combined.

5 comments for “So Many Books, So Little Time

  1. Lisa
    September 11, 2008 at 2:51 pm

    WOW! You have read a lot of books. I think I have dne a pretty good job for NOT being an English major, but a Business major, ha ha.

    As for feeling lost going the SAHM route/school, that is to be expected, right? I know when I stopped working to beme with the kids, it was a huge adjustment. So much of my identity was tied up in my work. It’s been 3 years no and I have fully adjusted. Of course, my kids are a bit much younger than yours so am very much “needed”. At least, they think they need me, I don’t always agree, lol.

    As for the blog, well, I go through phases where I write often and other phases whe it feels like complete crap. But it doesn’t matter, at least I’m getting it down on paper and that’s the most important part.

  2. Rebeckah
    September 16, 2008 at 12:01 am

    That is awesome that you have read so many on that list. I have to show this to my friend Jessica. She is a librarian. She will love this I think. So glad you stopped by today! God bless.

  3. Aerie (aka Mrs. Rodius)
    September 16, 2008 at 3:22 am

    56 is very impressive! I’m at 28 of 100. On your to do list? I’d go with One Hundred Years of Years of Solitude. Most excellent. A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of my top picks…you know, when someone asks you “if you were stranded on a desert island and could only have three books…”

  4. Rebeckah
    September 16, 2008 at 9:57 pm

    I came to see a new post today : ). Do you need a topic? I just joined this fun picture group on Wednesdays. You might like that. Do you like pictures? It is called ABC Wednesdays.

  5. Mom on the Run
    September 17, 2008 at 1:56 am

    I might check that one out…I’d like to post more often.

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