What Do You Read?

I ran across this post on Facebook tonight. It is a list of 100 books of which the BBC believes most people have read only six. Bold titles are those I have read, italics are those I’ve either started and never finished or read an excerpt.

When I add up my tally of read books, I come up with a tally of 21. I have to admit, though, that at my age, I don’t remember all of the titles.
Have I heard so much about such and such book that I assume I must have read it? Okay, so worst case scenario, I’ve read fifteen. So, if I have my figures right, that means I’ve read 2.5 times, or 250% more books on the list than it was predicted I had read. (Okay, I admit, I’m a numbers person!).

Anyway, it was just this evening that I found myself questioning what kind of books I really like to read. I think the answer is that I am an eclectic reader. I enjoy western and romance, thriller and mystery, books about the rich, books about the poor, books that take me behind the scenes (think Airport – those of you who remember it), books about the average family, books that inspire, books that challenge my intelligence (sometimes that’s not very hard to do!), and books that teach me something. (Yeah, I know. Run on sentence for sure!).

Ask me who my favorite author is and I really couldn’t tell you. I don’t watch for any particular author’s new book to hit the shelves. Half the time I don’t even remember the names of the authors who wrote the books I read, unless they are personal friends, of which I have many writers who are. Heck, at my age, I sometimes can’t even remember the name of the book! That’s why I keep a list of what I’ve read, but if I forget to add the title to my Excel file, it’s probably forever lost to my memory. Ever start a book, get half way through it, and suddenly you know the ending because you realize you’ve read it before. Been there, done that.

I love to read! I never miss the opportunity to devour a few words. I’ve been known to devour a few words while waiting in line at Wal-mart, sitting in “park” while traffic streams by from the opposite direction in a construction zone, sitting in line at parent pickup before my granddaughter gets out of school, and of course, there are those two to three minute commercials during a TV show (DVRs have kind of knocked out those reading moments, though).

What do you read? Where do you read? Why do you read?

Copy the list into a blank page on your own computer. Take the test. Let me know how you came out. Oh yeah, for the non-numbers folks, all you need is a number between one and one hundred. No need to report the percentage. I'll understand!

Thanks for reading my blog!

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 (all)
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
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 Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
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 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
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
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