The premise of this exercise is that someone has claimed that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
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 - (editors note: lol. What, they consider this anonymous?
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - tried to read it, but something more compelling was sitting on my desk.
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 - actually, just Romeo & Juliet, MacBeth, Hamlet, all of his histories (thanks to my drama teacher), As You Like It, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Tempest... um, okay, most of them really...
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
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
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 - tried to read it, bored the shit out of me.
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
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 - I've read some of them, but not the whole thing.
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 - why does this show up twice?
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Eh.... 40% ain't bad. Especially for what I'd call a rather arbitrary list. I mean seriously, there's like NO sci-fi. What about "War of the Worlds", "The Time Machine", "Stranger in a Strange Land", "I, Robot", "The Mote In Gods Eye"... I could go on and on, but you get what I mean. I fail to see how Adams made it to the list (much as I enjoy his work), but Niven, Heinlein and Asimov were snubbed. And not a single Mark Twain, and no Oscar Wilde?
Now I have to sit down and put together a top 100 list of books I've read and think everyone else should give a shot as well. I have a feeling it'll be substantially different....
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
And on further consideration, the statement that "National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below" bugs me. A lot. I can't figure out where the source for this statement comes. I did some googling around, and the closest I could come to a statement from the NEA that even remotely supports this is from their NEA report: "Reading at Risk" which stated "The 2002 SPPA asked all respondents how many books they read in 2002. Respondents who answered affirmatively indicated that they read approximately six books."
That's a far far cry from 'the average American has only read six of the books on this list'. All it says is that the median number of books read in 2002 by people who read books was six. (The average was something like 18, but that's thanks to avid readers like me. :))
If anyone can point me to an actual article or source where the NEA makes this claim, I'd sure appreciate it. Until then I'm modifying the statement in my post.
Post a Comment