to the younger ones on my Flist

[cornerofmadness]

when a professor askes for PRIMARY LITERATURE some random website doesn't count. I didn't mind that my students went to webmd or mayoclinic.com but they listed them as primary literature. And their grades shall reflect that since we had that discussion more than once.

The Big Reads people say most of us have read only about 6 of these books. (hell i read more than that off this list by the time i was in middle school)
Bold the ones you've read, italicise the ones you plan on reading (yeah I plan on reading no more of these)



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 I read the first two.
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 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
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
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
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (this sucked so hard)
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





well at least i started this one Pompeii-

369 / 7000 words. 5% done!

fireandice (oh this is like pulling teeth but i did surprass my first word count estimate so here's another)

1011 / 2000 words. 51% done!

fmaficexchange (okay so this only had to be 1000 words. I'm just putting this up to remind me to write as opposed to looking for actual count except for pompeii and bigbang... this could be finished right now but i want to expand it)

2658 / 2000 words. 133% done!

fma big bang - no progress. bad COM

Comments

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

My students' speciality is reading Wikipedia entries on the texts rather than the actual texts. I warn them sternly not to do this, but it doesn't always stick.

Bad=your reading list consists entirely of the work of Prof. Wikipedia
Worse=your essay is plagarised from Prof. Wikipedia (and Prof. Google)

Where's that Big Reads list from? Who picked it? It's very strange in parts, particularly the more modern stuff. No Raymond Chandler! No Virginia Woolf! No Philip K. Dick! But, uh, Dan Brown? The Five People You Meet in Heaven? I'd much rather have seen Ian Fleming than Dan Brown, despite the former's pretty dubious attitude to women.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

I don't know who Big Reads is either but i had the same reaction to the modern inclusions. Dan Brown? I'd rather have Steven King. Ditto with Iain Banks. I can't stand him (and his stuff is the type i usually enjoy).

Oh tell me about it. The english profs get that more than use science ones do and you have better resources for catching the cheaters. I keep telling them they don't know enough to know if Wiki is wrong or not and it sometimes IS.

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

Exactly my thoughts - why Dan Brown but no Stephen King? Never read Iain Banks but I've heard mixed reviews. Isn't he supposed to be quite misanthropic?

I've actually never used those programs for catching plagarists, although I'm sure they're handy. Normally you can spot 'em through blatant changes of style, and track the source via Google or Google Books. I've caught many naughty cheaters through the latter. But yes, it's rife in some places. I've found that if I give them a scary talking-to about plagarism and how culprits will be discovered, that cuts it down by more than half instantly.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

i don't know much about him personally, Banks that is.

Yeah i've slapped stuff into google and caught them that way. I wish my college would back us up on plagarism charges. I caught two people with a photocopy of my final and I'M the one who got into trouble.

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

That's crazy! My uni is quite tough on plagarism, thank goodness - in the UK, a lot of students plagarise in schools these days and arrive at university somehow unaware of how seriously wrong it is. Telling them it potentially can get them kicked out is a good wake up call.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

this is a pissant college in a place where no one thinks education is worthwhile (most of my neighrbos have not graduated high school) so they will NOT do anything to someone willing to pay.

I tell them they'll be off the soccer team since the coach at least DOES take it seriously (which means back to the UK for most of them)

[bob_fish.livejournal.com]

Back to the UK? Your college is full of Brits?

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

our football team is. that's how we get to nationals every year. We bring in footballers from the UK

[mulzrule.livejournal.com]

Erm...do your students even know what Primary Literature even means?!?!? *more weeping for the future*

Fun list. I've read a handful of these not to mention I read Tolkein and Dickens every year. Gotta love the classics. I need to find Gone with the Wind and Pride and Prejudice though.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

judging by other comments, no student does

i honestly don't like Jane Austen. i think it has more to do with the restrictions on women at that time than anything

[mulzrule.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I feel the same way about Austen but my friends have always been in love with her.

[sp23.livejournal.com]

I've read a whole bunch of these, and some I think I read in school, but now have no memory of their plots. And some I started to read, but couldn't get into. :-)

I read War and Peace as a Reader's Digest condensed version, and so I feel like I cheated and can never claim I actually read it. I have read the other Russian masterpieces though.

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

most of these were school reads for me too and i would never have read on my own (looking at you James Joyce)