Tuesday, August 18, 2009

How Well Read Are You?

I found this on Rebecca's blog Lost in Books. She found it on the blog Lit and Life first, so I am linking back to it, but the idea came first from Laura, at Laura's Reviews. Laura wanted to see how well read she was in American Literature so she combined a few top 100 lists of books pulling out the American authors. How well read do you think you are?

Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.

(Like Rebecca, I decided for fun to put an M for those whose movies I have seen.)


1. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (X)
2. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain (X)
3. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (M)
4. Moby Dick by Herman Melville(X)
5. The Scarlett Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne(M)
6. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (X) (M)
7. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin by Benjamin Franklin
8. Dune by Frank Herbert (M)
9. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
10. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (x)(M)
11. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (x)
13. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
14. O Pioneers! By Willa Cather
15. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
16. My Antonia by Willa Cather
17. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (M)
18. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
19. Little House on the Praire by Laura Ingalls Wilder (X)
20. Outlander by Diana Gabaldon (X)
21. Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich
22. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (X)(M)
23. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
24. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (will read this fall!)
25. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
26. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (M)
27. The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (M)
28. The Color Purple by Alice Walker (M)
29. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
30. The Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
31. Roots by Alex Haley (M)
32. The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (M)
33. Katherine by Anya Seton
34. The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (this fall..before the movie comes out!)
35. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (X)(M)
37. Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
38. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee(M)
39. The Collected Stories of Katherine Ann Porter
40. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson (M)
41. The Stand by Stephen King (partially)(M)
42. Carrie by Stephen King (X) (M)
43. Walden by Henry David Thoreau (X)
44. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (X)
45. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (M)
46. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
47. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
48. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
49. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck (M)
50. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
51. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (M)
52. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
53. Mystic River by Denis Lehane (M)
54. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
55. Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (M)
56. Rabbit Run by John Updike
57. Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates
58. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurty (M)
59. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan(M)
60. The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
61. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt (X)(M)
62. Sandman by Neil Gaiman
63. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
64. World’s Fair by E.L. Doctorow
65. The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini
66. Nickel & Dimed, Barbara Ehrenreich
67. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
68. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving (M-Simon Burch)
69. Friday Night Lights, H.G. Bissinger
70. Cathedral, Raymond Carver
71. A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley (M)
72. The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown (X)(M)
73. Practical Magic, Alice Hoffman (X) (M)
74. Deep End of the Ocean by Jacqueline Mitchard (M)
75. John Adams by David McCullough (M)
76. The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
77. My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Piccoult (M)
78. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
79. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
80. Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut (X)
81. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (X)
82. Native Son by Richard Wright
83. U.S.A. (trilogy) by John Dos Passos
84. Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
85. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (M)
86. The Bridge of the San Luis Ray by Thornton Wilder
87. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
88. The Magnificent Ambersons by Booth Tarkington (M)
89. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
90. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey (M)
91. The Hunt for Red October by Tom Clancy (M)
92. Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury (X) (M)
93. Beloved by Toni Morrison (M)
94. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
95. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand (M)
96. So Big by Edna Ferber
97. Pollyanna by Eleanor H. Porter
98. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
99. The Ponder Heart by Eudora Welty
100. A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Conner

Books read: 19 (eeeeekkkk!)
Books seen movie of: 36
Books read AND seen movie: 9
Books not read yet: 81

I better get busy! This list makes The Book Addict look very bad!!!


How do you compare? Do the Meme on your blog! Please link back here and to Laura's Reviews if you do. Thanks.

11 comments:

Thank you for visiting and taking the time to comment. It means so much.

I apologize for word verification, but as soon as I changed the settings from only users with Google accounts, I started receiving a ton of spam comments...within one hour of changing the settings. The bots are on high alert apparently.

  1. Yeah my score of 21 was pretty embarrassing. I thought I would have seen more movies, like you, but I didn't. Interesting.

    ReplyDelete
  2. On the plus side, you have seen a lot of the movies :) I can't figure out how some of these made any kind of a list. And 2 Ayn Rands? Strange list, but fun!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Yes girls! Thanks for posting...I love stuff like this =)

    ReplyDelete
  4. I feel good now, cause I've read alot of the books on there...yeah!

    ReplyDelete
  5. Michelle, here is the website I used to siwtch to a three column blog. You will lose this template since you need to minima. But after you do it you can turn around and get a different background again.

    http://www.thecutestblogontheblock.com/blog-secrets/145-how-to-get-a-3-column-template.html

    ReplyDelete
  6. Great list - I love how you marked movies watched too. It makes me want to update my list! The Ayn Rands came from the modern library top 100 list ...http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html

    We looked at this list a lot in my "classics" book club I was in for a couple of years in Milwaukee.

    ReplyDelete
  7. http://www.powells.com/prizes/pulitzer_fiction.html

    http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20207076_20207387_20207349,00.html

    A couple of other lists used to compile this "strange" list of books:-) I think I should post the Pulitzer prize winning list (maybe I'll do that today). I haven't read too many of them - although I've read other books by some of the authors.

    ReplyDelete
  8. http://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2009/08/pulitzer-prize-for-fiction-list.html Here is how I rate on the pulitzer prize winners list, not pretty!

    I updated the original posting for movies - http://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-well-read-are-you-american.html

    Here is how I did with the "new classics" list from Entertainment Weekly - also not pretty!http://lauragerold.blogspot.com/2009/08/entertainment-weeklys-top-100-new.html

    I'll have to post the Modern Library list in the future!

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  9. Thanks Laura! I will definitely be checking the new lists out!

    Awwww...thanks Ryan! Couldn't have done it without you =)

    ReplyDelete
  10. Here's my list: http://pattispenandpicks.blogspot.com/2009/08/how-well-read-are-you.html

    This was fun, but doesn't change my current focus on mysteries and teen fiction. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
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