Books We Have in Common

From the Group Zeitgeist page, here are the books we seem to have in common from the weighted list, excluding the Atwood titles.

Possession: A Romance by A. S. Byatt (47)
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (49)
The Hours by Michael Cunningham (45)
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (31)
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (63)
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (58)
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters (33)
Atonement by Ian McEwan (49)
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (52)
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (42)
A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth (30)
The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro (38)
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton (36)
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (39)
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (39)
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy (42)
Unless: A Novel by Carol Shields (25)
The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje (35)
A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf (34)
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens (46)
Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (36)
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (58)
Anil's Ghost by Michael Ondaatje (26)
The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against… by Naomi Wolf (24)
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (29)
Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen (45)
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (43)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson (28)
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (53)
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf (37)
The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (48)
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke (44)
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy (44)
Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf (30)
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (54)
Portrait of a Lady by Henry James (31)
Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels (21)
The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble (15)
Persuasion by Jane Austen (39)
Emma by Jane Austen (43)
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (42)
Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (31)
The Color Purple by Alice Walker (34)
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides (42)
Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (32)
Beloved by Toni Morrison (36)
Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (31)
Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey (22)
Behind the Scenes at the Museum: A Novel by Kate Atkinson (23)
The Passion of New Eve by Angela Carter (14)
Mansfield Park by Jane Austen (35)
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie (30)
Lord of the Flies by William Golding (42)
Life of Pi by Yann Martel (45)
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian by Marina Lewycka (24)
A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong (17)
Middlemarch by George Eliot (32)
The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde (34)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (45)
Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters (23)
Saturday by Ian McEwan (30)
Such a Long Journey by Rohinton Mistry (16)
When We Were Orphans by Kazuo Ishiguro (23)
The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall (14)
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi (32)
Wise Children by Angela Carter (17)
On Beauty by Zadie Smith (29)
The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir (24)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen (33)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (40)
The Awakening by Kate Chopin (31)
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing (21)
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (35)
The optimists by Andrew Miller (9)
Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (27)
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (31)
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (15)
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (26)
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez (42)
Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez (36)

Any comments? Anything that surprised you? Any books you expected to see but didn't?

I guess the main thing that suprised me was how few of those books I have in my library. Basically, we all love literature, especially lit written by and for women, with a bit of chick lit, feminist thought, and religion thrown in for flavor. Atwood is one of the few fiction authors I actually read, so it shouldn't surprise me that I have so few books in common-and many of the ones listed, I've read and didn't care for (ie-Reading Lolita in Tehran).

I have 65% of these (there are 80 titles on this list, btw)

A couple of things struck me. Many of the titles are classics which an English major would be likely to have. There are also many books which a reader interested in women's studies or women's literary traditions might be interested in. Seems heavy on British authors.

VERY interesting. I agree that many of these are typical English major titles--however, this English major has only read four of them for school, and two of those I'd read beforehand.

Glad you counted the 80 so I didn't have to . . . I've read 35 of the 80 (44%). I own a further 18 that I haven't gotten to yet (26%). Combine them for a total of 53, or 66%, which aligns with your figure, Lois. Further, I have 7 on my TBR list, so that's now 60, or 75%. There are only 3 that I've never heard of.

I expected to see more CanLit (Carol Shields, Alice Munro, Margaret Laurence, Robertson Davies, Mordecai Richler, Timothy Findlay, Jane Urquhart, Anne Michaels, and so on.

Thanks for posting this . . .

Hmm, I've only read 11, and some of those I read for university courses. A few are on my tbr pile. Some I started reading, but soon lost interest in.

However, I do prefer sci fi and other non-realist or simply unusual fiction in general, and I don't read that many classics.

I prefer Atwood's sci fi to her other fiction but even her more 'realist' fiction has such incredibly vivid and unusual prose with fantasy elements easing their way in all the time, especially since she has such close studies of her characters' psychologies. I enjoy her fiction for these reasons as much as I do her stories and perspectives on women's lives.

I've read 44 -- not sure how many I own. I own about 5 that I haven't read. I never even heard about Sarah Waters before all the chat on LT about her newest book -- guess I should check her out. I'm surprised there's nothing by Louise Erdrich, Amy Tan, Christa Wolf, and only one Toni Morrison.

Just a little update. From the Group Zeitgeist page today:

1. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood (103)
2. The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (96)
3. Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood (91)
4. Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood (89)
5. Cat's Eye by Margaret Atwood (88)
6. The Robber Bride by Margaret Atwood (82)
7. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (70)
8. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (68)
9. Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë (64)
10. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (60)

The full list seems to be no longer available.

I have all bar one which is amazing. Can't admit to having read them all yet though!

I've read all 10 of those -- most of them a long time ago...

I own all of those--two I haven't found time to read yet but are high on Mnt TBR.

I own 6 of those 10, and have read 9 of them (Wuthering Heights is the exception). Of the original list, I've read about 31 of them, and own several more that I haven't yet read. And there are a number of other titles on the list that I am interested in checking out.

I'm 10 for 10 also.

I meant I had all of the original list which surprised me! Though have read the 10 in 7!

ETA: The Red Queen by Margaret Drabble (15) - is the one I don't have.

I think I have read 12 of the original list. Not very many, but I am not too surprised. As others pointed out, it is heavy on older Brit lit, which is not my strength. Come to think of it, I am not sure I have a strength. I was a voracious reader before I went to college! All these years of education severely damaged my ability to read for pleasure. Thanks to the kindle, I am rediscovering my favorite pastime. It feels so good...

By the way, how do you get those lists?
Thanks, k4k

>14 krazy4katz: Theoretically, from the menu tab on the upper right hand part of of the group's home page, but I've not been able to get anything to load for ages.

>14 krazy4katz:,15
Yes, the Group Zeitgeist was disabled some time ago for performance reasons, IIRC.

>16 sqdancer: thanks.