How poorly-read am I?
No, the title of this post isn’t asking about my traffic stats. I already know how abysimal those are. Rather, The Guardian recently put together a list of “1000 novels everyone must read”. Let’s find out how low my score is! For the sake of brevity, what follows are only the works I have read. Those that have sustained multiple reads, or deserve to, are asteriskized.
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes (the abridged version — not sure if that counts, but I suspect that that’s what most people read)
*Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor
*Penrod by Booth Tarkington
*A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
Thank You Jeeves by PG Wodehouse
The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
Tally: 7 (ouch)
*And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
*A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle
*The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
*The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Goldfinger by Ian Fleming
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Native Son by Richard Wright
(Very surprised that I’ve read more of these than the comedy picks. Hmm.)
Tally: 19
The Awakening by Kate Chopin
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Tally: 25
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
(All of the titles from the past two categories I can claim only because of high-school English class. Sad but true.)
Tally: 31
*The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
*Foundation by Isaac Asimov
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
*Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
*Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll
*The Man who was Thursday by GK Chesterton
*Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
*The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
*The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis
*** and *! A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M Miller Jr
Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Discworld Series by Terry Pratchett
*Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by JK Rowling
Hyperion by Dan Simmons
*The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
*The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
The Time Machine by HG Wells
The Sword in the Stone by TH White
Tally: 52
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Silas Marner by George Eliot
*Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
*Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
*Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
Animal Farm by George Orwell
*One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovtich by Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
The Red and the Black by Stendhal
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
Tally: 61
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway (This has the distinction of being one of only two books that I’ve read and absolutely hated.)
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Master and Commander by Patrick O’Brian
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Emmuska Orczy
Black Beauty by Anna Sewell
Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
A Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Jules Verne
Candide by Voltaire
Tally: 75
That’s it. 75 books out of 1000. Seven and a half percent. Oh well, I suppose that I can add the other 925 to the end of my to-read list … and get to them at some point in the afterlife perhaps.
I have read a book or two that wasn’t on the list, though.
Does it matter? Can you claim more? If so, please keep your boasting humble!
3 years ago