Are you smarter than a British citizen?

[lapacifidora]

Found this on my friend's Facebook profile & it struck me as an interesting experiment. (However, I deleted most of her drunken rants, amusing though they were.)

I've read 34, if you don't count the series of multiple books that are on this list. Moreover, the number jumps to 52 if I count the books I have immediate access to but haven't gotten to yet. And I've seen the definitive movie version of a few more.

Still, I'm smarter than the average British citizen. Holla.
***
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.  Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES.

• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.

• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt. 

Tag other book nerds. Tag me as well so I can see your responses! (Or not, after all reading is not a competition! I'm betting that we're all well over 6 books, and I am curious to see the common ground). 

 

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 (7 book series)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (3 book series)

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

16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald 

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 Caroll 

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (7 book series again)

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion - Jane Austen 

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis (this is part of #33! I have some real problems with this list)

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  (I felt like an idiot afterwards if that help)

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

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 (ugh)

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 Inferno - Dante

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 - 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 (Part of 14. Clever Brits. Not.)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[moeexyz.livejournal.com]

Ha, I've read 7 of them. But there's like 15 of them I started and never finished. :L

I should probably get on that.

[lapacifidora.livejournal.com]

Don't feel bad: I have several books in my bookcase I've started and then never finished. I don't really want to finish them at this point, but I refuse to donate/sell them until I've finished them.

(There is only one book I never finished that I never *will* finish, but it was so godawful & depressing I don't feel bad about not finishing it.)

[jheaton.livejournal.com]

I'm reasonably certain the BBC didn't actually have anything to do with this, but regardless it's an interesting exercise. I've read 34 in their entirety, plus another 7 in part. (If you care: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 13, 14, 16, 18, 22, 25, 29, 30, 31, 33, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 46, 54, 60, 63, 68, 73, 74, 76, 80, 81, 84, 87, 89, 91, 94, 99, 100)

I can understand you not having read the HP series given that you've not read the other fantasy series on the list (Narnia notwithstanding), but how have you not read Gatsby?

[lapacifidora.livejournal.com]

Gatsby was a suggested but not *required* text in my Junior year American Lit class. I don't remember what I read instead, but I was like, 'Eh.'

The thing is: I loathed 'Catcher in the Rye.' I seriously and genuinely and emphatically hated that book. It struck me as self indulgent and confusing, and there was nothing remotely sympathetic about Holden.

And I suppose there was something about the summary of 'Gatsby' that struck me the same way. However, I probably will read it before the new movie version comes out; and I know it may not be as bad as Catcher, as I hated 'For Whom the Bell Tolls' the first time I read it, then I reread it a year later and suddenly I realized it was awesome.

[jheaton.livejournal.com]

Hm. I guess Catcher and Gatsby are similar in that the former is about a self-absorbed little shit and the latter is about several self-absorbed little shits, but I think Fitzgerald's skill as a writer is such that the Gatsby characters come off much more sympathetically than Holden Caulfield, for me at least.

(I also was not a big fan of Catcher, obviously.)