Big Read Meme

Have you heard of the Big Read? Apparently the average American adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they have printed. Camels and Chocolate started this meme on her blog and it seemed only fitting to try it out over here at Booknymphs. Becky and I pride ourselves on being better than average readers--let's see if we actually are.

1. Bold those you have read.

2. Italicize those you intend to read.

3. Put asterisks next to 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
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 Hitchhiker'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 Bernieres
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

40 out of 100--not too shabby.

Better Single Than Sorry by Jen Schefft (#25, Nonfiction)

Am I embarrassed to post this? Yes. Do I regret reading it? No. We were in Books-A-Million at Myrtle Beach and I needed something light and possibly funny to entertain me for the last day at the beach and the plane ride. I blazed through this baby in two days and I even learned something! 

I would recommend this book to the newly single female. How can you read what Schefft writes and not feel empowered to be single? You really can't. Being single is not a curse, it is not something to be ashamed about. It is better to be single than to be in a relationship that is sucking the life out of you. It is better to stay strong and stick to your gut feeling than to stay with someone who you might not really want to be with. 

I liked Schefft's point about never compromising yourself in order to be in a relationship. You should never settle for anything less than what you deserve. 

Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich (#24, Nonfiction)

Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed has been on my reading list for a of couple years. For some reason I thought it was a must-read and that I would learn something from it. I was also very much interested in the undercover reporting aspect of it--it had promise. 

I was annoyed from the very beginning though when you find out she kind of cheats when she attempts to live as the other half lives. Her point is clear--you can't get by on minimum wage. She describes her stint as a maid, as a Wal-Mart employee, and as a waitress. She describes these menial jobs and really makes you hope you never have to do them. Having worked both retail and in the food service industry, I must say that I agreed with how she described how much work was required for very little to no pay. I mean, working at J. Crew I got paid 9 dollars to fold clothes, try to get the customers to buy more items, and to run around putting things away as people tried things on. It was a very boring, very numbing job that I wish to never relive. 

Does Ehrenreich offer a solution to the problem she supposedly uncovers through her undercover reporting? Poor and unskilled workers are forced to take low paying jobs, doing the work that no one in America wants to do. Why is this? For Ehrenreich it is because those filling the job positions let their employers treat them as such. You can only be treated how you let others treat you. But the fact is, as long as there are people desperate for work, desperate to get by, they will take any job they can get and they will accept any amount of money for that work. 

Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer (#23, Young Adult)

As you can see, I am firmly entrenched in this series. I am not vouching for the quality of the writing but the stories are somewhat compelling. I can read this and not think about anything else. It is literary absorption at its best. These types of books are meant to be particularly well written, but perhaps there is something to learn from it. 

It is my belief that the answers to certain questions are sometimes right in front of your eyes and if you actually open them to look, you might just find what you are looking for. Here is a quote that jumped out at me and I can't help but go back to it: 

"...I can't be happy without him."

"You've never tried," he disagreed. "When he left, you spent all your energy holding on to him. You could be happy if you let go" (333).

Interesting thought. Who knew wisdom could come out of some teen romance? 

New Moon by Stephenie Meyer (#22, Young Adult)

I am a sucker for books in a series. I always have been and I probably always will be. There is just something very alluring to reading about the same characters over the course of several books. I enjoy the character development, the continuation of their story. It is probably the same reason why I really enjoy certain tv shows--nothing beats a nuanced character development that is only possible through multiple installments. 

The Twilight Saga Series is addicting. I moved onto New Moon almost immediately after having finished Twilight. With each book we learn more and more about the vampire culture, but the best part about these books, as cheesy and as directed at teenage girls as they are, is the love story. I like how Meyer represents love.  

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer (#21, Young Adult)

I was slightly prejudiced against this book at first. I checked it out from the library a couple months ago after having read an article about the Mormon author but then never got around to reading it before I had to return it. I don't like how closely Meyer spells her first name to mine, and also, it's a bestseller. And if you have been reading Booknymphs, you know how Becky and I feel about bestsellers. But alas, when on vacation at the beach, it is quite necessary to be in possession of several beach reads. A quick trip to the Wal Mart and this book and the second one in the series were the only thing I would deign to read so I bought them and haven't regretted it since. 

Meyer is a Mormon, but she writes about vampires and eternal damnation. I was super skeptical because the writing is not all that great, but I like the vampire theme. I like how she plants the seeds for the subsequent books. Meyer is a storyteller and her twist on vampire lore is interesting. I am not saying this book was the best book I have ever read, but I am saying that if you are going to be sitting on the beach, or by the side of a pool, this is a great beach read. Once I started reading, I didn't want to put it down. 

You Shall Know Our Velocity! by Dave Eggers (#20, Contemporary Literature)

Yes, I know. I already read Dave Eggers this year. But after reading What is the What and really liking it, I decided I needed more Eggers. I had a random conversation with a customer at Pie one afternoon who also happened to be reading What is the What. He told me I should check out the other books too, but that I should start my exploration with You Shall Know Our Velocity! I complied and went immediately to the library and checked out a copy. 

I loved the premise of this book. There are two guys, Hand and Will, who need to get rid of 32,000 dollars and fast. They plan a seven day trip around the world to randomly hand out the cash to unsuspecting locals. I was hooked in the beginning but I found the plot to stagnate in the middle. There definitely was not enough momentum to make this a quick read, but I don't think it was Eggers goal to really grip us and send us on a fun-filled adventure. There is something he is saying about the world and it is at times quite a depressing read. I didn't like the narrator, especially after I found out he was quite unreliable. I know this wasn't nonfiction, but it was fiction parading as nonfiction that was really quite fictitious--if that makes any sense at all. Read the book and you will know what I mean. 

Would I recommend this to a friend, knowing that my enjoyment of it was short lived? Probably not, but if I did, there would be a lot talk about. (Hmm, Becky? You ready for another Prep?...)