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I like books, in case you didn't know.
The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed. Well let's see.
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
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
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 (I keep trying, but I don't think I'll ever be able to finish Taming of the Shrew.)
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
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I've read 56. I'M IN UR STATISTICS, SCREWING UP UR NATIONAL AVERAGES
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Hi-fucking-larious! You crazy cat lover you. :P
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I assume they didn't count book you read in school, but think about how many people haven't read a single book since then or maybe just one to get that statistic right. It kinda makes me cry.
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*agrees with your icon*
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My brother doesn't read. He read the books he was required to for school and one outside of school (but only when he was on the toilet and it took him seven years to complete) and decided reading wasn't for him.
So he only reads what he has to read for work. And magazines and newspapers. But still. It is kinda sad, but I hope he does not equal average here and I hope that work related books also count as book, even if such kind of books weren't listed above. Cause then he reads at least one a months, too.
Last year I only read 11 books. I was embarrassed. This year I am already on number 14, though. Don't know what was up last year.
The icon is awesome. I want Ray read smut stories to me. No, actually I want Fraser to read them and Ray to reenact them with me or Fraser depending on if the couple in the book Fraser reads to us is gay or straight.
My world would be perfect. *dreamy sigh*
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I think work-related books definitely count, because at least the people reading them are still reading, and they're keeping that skill set from atrophying.
My brother reads more than most of his friends, but nowhere near the amount of books that Mom, Dad, and I read, so we always worry about his reading, and we recommend him our favorite books, and they sit in his room for months. My mom's sister is the same way, except she never reads, ever. She thinks reading is stupid, and Mom's always trying to convince her otherwise.
I used to read a lot more books, back when I didn't have television and the internet to distract me. I spend a lot more time now reading fanfic than reading actual hard-copy books, and sometimes that makes me sad.
UM CAN I COME LIVE IN YOUR WORLD WITH YOU? DO YOU THINK THEY NEED ANY MORE PEOPLE TO ENACT BOOKS WITH?
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My mom reads these stupid romance novels. Better than nothing, I guess.
Yeah, counting the fanfic I read now, I probably read about the same, but it is just not books.
You are very welcome to live in my world with me and all the hot boys and everyone who comes for a visit every now and then. I am sure we can find a book for all of us to be in.
I just made myself horny working on a wallpaper for
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Um OMG THE HOT. Hee, I briefly toyed with the idea of picking up smoking because Humphrey Bogart looked so cool doing it. There are just some people that smoking really really works for, I guess. AND CALLUM IS DEFINTELY ONE OF THEM.
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But everyone else around me thought it was lame to like dead actors (and why have my actors all been dead or died shortly after I discovered them, I was such a freak as a young teenager, but at least a freak with taste) and not the latest movie hotties and boyband members. Come to think of it, maybe they were all dead because they smoked!
I like that we were smart enough to not pick it up. We are cool without it. And we are not dead. Well, Callum is not dead yet either. But still. We save money!
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You know, I think Bogart did in fact die of throat cancer...
OMG I LOVE YOU. We should start a club of people who liked dead actors when they were teenagers!
This is true! Even if I didn't have issues with actual smoking (for one, I've seen what it does to your house and your furniture and your pets), I would have issues with the amount of money it costs keep smoking.
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Yeah, he did. Klaus Kinski died of a heart failure that is connected to heavy smoking. And I bet James Dean only came off the road because he was having smoking withdrawals or was trying to find a cigarette to light or so and wasn't paying much attention to the road.
We totally should. We only need to find a third person who was like that as a teenager.
Yeah, that's why I never get why people start it. I only had a few drews once when we were kids and shared a cigarette with like 5 or 6 kids, but it tasted awful. So it can't be the taste that makes young people smoke. And where do they get all that money? In Glasgow there are 10 year olds smoking during their school breaks. And here probably, too. When I was 10 I spend all my money on rock'n'roll and comic books and bubble gum. (I would totally give you a cookie and a bubble gum and maybe even a comic if you would get that reference, but you sadly won't. Soon you will, though, cause even if you don't notice, I am slowly implanting my obsessions on you. :p)
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A friend of mine, her mom is almost totally broke, and they don't always have, you know, food, but she still shells out the money for her cigarettes every week. :P
OOH TELL ME WHAT THE REFERENCE IS FROM! (I CAN ALWAYS USE MORE OBSESSIONS!)
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Yeah, I never get that either. These wallfare mothers complaining about how they don't get enough to feed their kids, but still smoking all the time while they give their complainy interviews. I am all for food stamps. Really, have your kids go to school without breakfast because smoking is more important to you should be forbidden.
It is from the Headstones' song "When Something Stands For Nothing"
http://www.lyricsdomain.com/8/headstones/when_something_stands_for_nothing.html
But really, you aren't there yet. First I will give you Callum Fever (well, I guess I already did ;)) then you'll eventually watch Hard Core Logo and discover Callum's BFF Hugh and his rough but amazing acting and then you will start listening to his music, which you first won't really like, but then you'll move on to watch Hugh in other shows/movies and see how his acting improves up to a point where he is even better than his master (don't tell Callum, but the awesome thing about Hugh's acting is that he sucked all the tips and tricks out of Callum (he called him to ask how Callum would play this and that scene and OMG so cute!) and then added his own style and I am in love) and then you listen to his music again and it will hit you. Hugh Flu. It usually comes with Callum Fever sooner or later. I would appologize for infecting you, but ahem, it would not be sincere.
I love my boys *snuggles them*
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You should read "On the Road," if only for the amusement you can find in pretending it's an AU version of Supernatural. ;D
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I think my favorite descriptive line is when Sa
ml calls he and Dean: "two broken-down heroes of the Western night."Too many good lines to count, but another you're probably not to yet (chapter four or five): "Behind us lay the whole of America and everything Dean and I had previously known about life, and life on the road. We had finally found the magic land at the end of the road and we never dreamed the extent of the magic."
COME ON!
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This description of Dean:
"He was simply a youth tremendously excited about life, and though he was a con-man, he was only conning because he wanted so much to live and get involved with people who would otherwise pay no attention to him."
There were a couple of other quotes, but I can't find them right now because my mini-bookmarks fell out. :(
I've just started chapter 7, so I'll start keeping better track of the awesome.
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This week's goal: FINISH BOOK
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http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/04/07/white-problems-poorly-read-partners/
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(ranks up there with the book I bought a year and a half ago "Field Guide to Evangelicals"....absolutely priceless.)