The Big Read

The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

The Rules:

1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

**1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
**4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible
*7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
*8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
**10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
#12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
**14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
*15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
#18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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- C.S. Lewis
*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 Bernières
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 - L.M. Montgomery
*47 Far From The Madding Crowd
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 - Émile 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 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 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

Spring Reading Challenge

Thanks to Kathleen for encouraging this.  although I will probably get some other reading done on the side, my intentional reading list for March, April and May (Autumn here) is:

The Godly Man's Picture (Puritan Challenge)

Precious Remedies Against Satan's Devices (Puritan Challenge)

Come and Welcome to Jesus Christ (Puritan Challenge)

Ancient History - Rollins Vol. I & II

History of the English-Speaking People Vol II

Modern Times - Johnson

Basic Economics - Sowell

Freedom at Midnight - Collins and Lapierre

Fathers and Sons - Turgenev

The House of the Seven Gables - Hawthorn

The Unlearned Lessons of the Twentieth Century - Delsol

History of Australia - Manning Clark

I hope that I will manage all of them, but we'll see what 'unexpected opportunities' pop up.

"In praise of Prejudice" by Theodore Dalrymple

The book is nicely bound.  After you have said that, you don't have much left to say in praise of it.  Not only could this book have done with an editor (not something I'm usually in favour of, being a firm believer in authorial proprietorship), but it could have used a proof-reader!  It is a compendium of short essays on the consequences of letting every man do what is right in his own eyes, with some nuggets, but not enough substance to justify a book.  Almost every essay had typographical and grammatical errors (not just misspellings, but missing or added words, sometimes making the meaning extremely difficult to decipher).

Puritan Reading Challenge 2008

I was thinking about joining this in January, but don't have "The Bruised Reed", but, inspired by Richard Baxter and Tim Challies, I've decided to commit myself for the remainder of the course.  Now to catch up!