Oh yeah, I’ve read it…
The folks at the blog Book Riot surveyed over 800 of their readers, asking what books they pretend to have read. The “winners”…
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (85 mentions)
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Bible
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
- Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
- Fifty Shades of Grey by E.L. James
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- Harry Potter (series) by J.K. Rowling
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (21 mentions)
The full list does contain some (though not much) non-fiction; Critique of Pure Reason and The Communist Manifesto make the top 50. Still, it’s a surprise not to see A Brief History of Time near the top…
Read the full story here— and enjoy the comparisons with their “best-loved” and “intended to read” lists.
[Image above sourced here.]
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As we rethink our Kindle queues, we might send elegantly-printed birthday greetings to William Caxton; he was born on this date in 1422… or so tradition holds; his actual birthday was surely around this time, but is unknown. Caxton worked as a merchant, diplomat, writer, and translator; but is best remembered as a printer– the first English printer. Caxton and the dissemination of his printed works are credited with helping to standardize the English language (to homogenize regional differences); he’s also credited with establishing the spelling of “ghost” with a silent h (a function of his familiarity with the Flemish spelling).
Daniel Maclise’s depiction of Caxton showing the first specimen of his printing to King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth at the Almonry, Westminster