Tag Archives: lists

The Big Read- How do I Stack Up?

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The BBC released The Big Read in 2003, hoping to find the nation’s best loved novel. Thankfully for Britain, Tolkien came out on top and victorious, as he deserves to be. Eleven years on, this list is possibly little changed, as there are a lot of classics and books that have become modern classics on it, which is lovely to see!

Nut Free Nerd had this on her blog, so I thought I’d see how many I have read.

  1. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
  2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
  3. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
  4. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
  5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
  6. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
  7. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
  8. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
  9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
  10. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
  11. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
  12. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
  13. Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
  14. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
  15. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
  16. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
  17. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
  18. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  19. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières
  20. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
  21. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
  22. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
  23. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
  24. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
  25. The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien
  26. Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
  27. Middlemarch by George Eliot
  28. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
  29. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
  30. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
  31. The Story of Tracy Beaker by Jacqueline Wilson
  32. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
  33. The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
  34. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  35. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl
  36. Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
  37. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
  38. Persuasion by Jane Austen
  39. Dune by Frank Herbert
  40. Emma by Jane Austen
  41. Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
  42. Watership Down by Richard Adams
  43. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  44. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  45. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
  46. Animal Farm by George Orwell
  47. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
  48. Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy
  49. Goodnight Mister Tom by Michelle Magorian
  50. The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
  51. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
  52. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  53. The Stand by Stephen King
  54. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  55. A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth
  56. The BFG by Roald Dahl
  57. Swallows and Amazons by Arthur Ransome
  58. Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
  59. Artemis Fowl by Eoin Colfer
  60. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  61. Noughts & Crosses by Malorie Blackman
  62. Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
  63. A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
  64. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough
  65. Mort by Terry Pratchett
  66. The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton
  67. The Magus by John Fowles
  68. Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett
  69. Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett
  70. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  71. Perfume by Patrick Süskind
  72. The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell
  73. Night Watch by Terry Pratchett
  74. Matilda by Roald Dahl
  75. Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
  76. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
  77. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
  78. Ulysses by James Joyce
  79. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
  80. Double Act by Jacqueline Wilson
  81. The Twits by Roald Dahl
  82. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith
  83. Holes by Louis Sachar
  84. Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake
  85. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  86. Vicky Angel by Jacqueline Wilson
  87. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  88. Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
  89. Magician by Raymond E. Feist
  90. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
  91. The Godfather by Mario Puzo
  92. The Clan of the Cave Bear by Jean M. Auel
  93. The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett
  94. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
  95. Katherine by Anya Seton
  96. Kane and Abel by Jeffrey Archer
  97. Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
  98. Girls in Love by Jacqueline Wilson
  99. The Princess Diaries by Meg Cabot
  100. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie

39/100

Not a bad effort! I do own quite a few of these, or intend to read them at some point in my life, so by the time I shuffle off this mortal coil, I’ll be rather well read (by this list’s standards anyway)

So? How do you go? Let me know!

Top Ten Tuesdays- Book Cover Trends

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Image

 

Top Ten Tuesday is run by The Broke and the Bookish.

Everyone loves a good book cover. I believe 90% of people choose a book by it’s cover- I know I do. I tend to avoid books with shiny stars or baby colours, for example, as they are usually belonging to the chick lit genre. I avoid that type of book like the plague, so a cover of that ilk will make me walk straight past.

I love a pretty book cover, particularly when it’s a hardback. I can deal with ugly covers but it’s a bit disappointing. They sort of turn me off the book.

Book Cover Styles I Love

1.

Image I love these editions. Too pretty and they feel really nice!

2.

Image Pretty much anything from Vintage. So very pretty. They tend to have the nicest cover art and pretty good quality paper. My bookshelf is heavy with red spines, so I wish they would change colours every so often, but that’s okay, the front covers make up for it!

3.

Image I love these covers. They scream mystery and history, my favourites!

4.

Image I have this edition of Persuasion and it is stunning! It smells good, feels good, is shiny, has coloured page edges, hardcover with a vintage feel… It has it all. I want the whole set!

5.

Image  This is my favourite book, so I’m possibly biased. But I love her perfect red lips, the script and the postage stamps. It just embodies the book. However, I was once in Dymocks and found another book with exactly the same woman on the cover, with the picture merely reversed. So perhaps it’s gone a little far…

Books Cover Styles I Hate

1.

Image I have nothing against the Twilight cover or others copying it. Oh no, I think they can look quite handsome. THIS, however, MAKES ME FURIOUS!!!! Oh sweet baby Jesus, I don’t even know where to begin. No. Just… No. You can Twilightify the covers of classics all you like, but the teen masses, for the most part, will not understand them. They will begin reading them, give up in 20 pages and condemn all classics to the rubbish.

2.

Image This is the type of book that screams CHICK LIT to me. I don’t enjoy reading this genre, so steer well clear. This cover is missing the shiny gold stars and such that often adorn these books, but it does have a honking great sticker on it. I hate when they put stickers on my books, especially ones I can’t remove!

3.

Image I really dislike this Penguin range. I don’t like the cover art and I really don’t like the pages. They feel all rough and uneven, which I just really don’t like.

4.

Image I wish these Penguin editions were prettier. The only ones I’ve liked the cover of were Anna Karenina and some of the Charles Dickens covers. They mostly seem so gloomy and dark, but what do you want for $10?

5.

Image I don’t know… I just don’t like them. Too clashy and too bright.