How Well Read Are You?

What makes a person well read?

Every once in a while some newspaper -- usually a hoity-toity one from the UK, publishes a list of the 100-or-so books everyone should read in their lifetime and makes a big deal about how few of them people have read.

I admit to cheating on these surveys, or at least fudging a bit.

• If I took a class in college where I was supposed to have read the book and I read at least part of it, I click Read It! 
• If I was supposed to read the book, didn't but managed to write an "A" paper about it. Read It! 
• Saw a critically-acclaimed BBC production of a classic novel -- Read It! 
• Heard smart classmates and a good professor have a really good discussion about a book while I was hoping not to be called on? Yup. Read it!

In truth, I am not as "well read" as I should be, or as I believe I should be, considering both my bachelor's degree and my master's degree are in  English Literature. People expect that I have read all of Shakespeare's plays and poetry, everything by Chaucer, Carroll, Dickens, Woolf, Austen, Bronte, Alcott, Steinbeck, Faulkner, Tolkien, and lots and lots of poetry.

Truth time. Below is the BBC's famous "How many have you read" list that was circulated back in 2009. I've highlighted the ones I've read from start to finish -- no fudging (41 books). I've put the ones I really want to read (someday) in red. I've put snarky notes in blue.

41%. Am I well read?

Although looking through this list makes me feel like I'm missing key entries in my Reader Resume, there are so many other books -- hundreds -- that I've read which are not on the list that have contributed greatly to my life, emotionally and intellectually, and even socially. Where is Elie Wiesel? David Sedaris? Michael Chabon? For that, try this list: 1,000 Books Everyone Must Read

How many have you read? Which books would you have on a "must read to be well read" list?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien -- planning on reading it with the kids.
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible  -- I don't believe anyone has read this in it's entirety. I have read every word of the Torah, however, and the 4 gospels, and Revelations was a kick.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell  -- living it. No need to read it.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens 
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott -- again, eith the kids.
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- OK. Yeah. No. Not all of them are worth reading.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
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 
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 -- another one to read with the kids
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 -- Honestly, I'll just watch the BBC series and Robert Downey Jr.
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