One of the activities that my daily blogging challenge is cutting heavily into is reading. Since I’m not currently adding many new titles to my lifetime reading list, I’m turning to some other lists for a bit of consolation.
I think that for next year I’ll have to define for myself a serious reading challenge.
14 Women Writers Who Dominate The Universe Of Sci-Fi
I decided to start with Maddie Crum’s list of women science fiction authors for Huffington Post because I anticipated that I’d have my worst score here. I don’t read much science fiction. My reading in this genre is limited to the best known classics.
This is a list of authors rather than of specific books. I include in my tally the number of writers whose books I’ve read at least one of.
How many I’ve read: 4 of 14, or 28%
The percentage looks so much better than the actual number.
NPR’s Top 100 Science-Fiction & Fantasy Books
I don’t read much fantasy, either, but I hoped I might do better with this list because it includes some classics of literature.
How many I’ve read: 28, or 28%, which the web site tells me is in the top 37% of people who have participated.
At least I’m consistent.
The 100 best novels written in English: the full list
After two years of careful consideration, Robert McCrum has reached a verdict on his selection of the 100 greatest novels written in English.
Keep in mind that this list is from a newspaper in the United Kingdom.
If you want to know how McCrum made his choices, there’s a link to his discussion at the top of the page.
But I’m putting off the inevitable:
How many I’ve read: 48, or 48%
Darn. I was hoping for at least 50%. In my defense, I have enough of the ones I haven’t read on my list of classics TBR, so I at least give myself a pat on the back for knowing where my deficiencies lie.
BBC Believes You Only Read 6 of These Books…
I remember seeing something like this list by the BBC several years ago. Here’s List Challenges’s explanation:
Interestingly, the BBC never actually made this declaration. The list was created by an unknown individual and spread around the internet as a meme called The BBC Book List Challenge. It was probably loosely based on another list of books that was the result of a survey carried out in 2003 by the BBC in which three quarters of a million people voted to find the nation’s best-loved novels of all time.
The explanation ends with a link to BBC’s The Big Read – Best Loved Novels of All Time.
How many I’ve read: 58, or 58%, in the top 7%
Well, that’s more like it. Actually, I’ve read 58.3 of these works, since I read the first volume of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. And a number of the books on this list that I haven’t yet read are on my list of classics TBR.
How about you? How many of the books on these lists have you read?
