Reading Meme

[jedibuttercup]

Meme borrowed from bijjy by way of cleothemuse:

The BBC allegedly believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

[bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. 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
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 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 - CS Lewis (which IS a part of #33, duh)
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
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
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

Hm. The list itself seems a little unbalanced; but then lists of this type always do. I've read 35 in their entirety, and two partially. I owe a few of those to high school and college lit classes, but the rest to a naturally curious (but allergic to angstiness for its own sake) mind.

Of those I haven't marked, I own about three of them but haven't read them yet, and have seen videos of others but was never inspired to pick up the original material. For shame, I know. Anyone have any specific positive recommendations for any of the nonbolded books above?
~

Comments

[trinfaneb.livejournal.com]

When I was in my early 20s I had the wonderful experience of reading "Lolita" and then watching the movie. I loved both and they are very well done.

I also loved "Catch 22" but I'm not sure how well it stands the test of time.

[anabels.livejournal.com]

For the Orwell books and "Brave New World" put aside the film versions they do very little justice to the books and all three are well worth the reading. Both authors have some interesting ideas about what top them was the future and now looks eerily like our present.

"Rebecca" is also brilliant and I will have to buy another copy shortly because mine is starting to fall apart. Ditto "Dracula" but get the film tie in edition because it has a very good introduction to the genre and the context within which Stroker was writing and makes the book far more enjoyable and accessible (I have the same problem with Bronte books).

I enjoyed "Memoirs of a Geisha" when I first read it but I find Liza Dalby's anthropological studies of geisha and kimono far more rewarding.

You'd find the Faraway Tree collection a slightly irritating read - Enid Blyton's style is awful, but you enjoy the cross over potential for writing fan-fic :)

I might have to snag this one and do it myself :)

[(Anonymous)]

Wilkie Collins The Woman In White which I read years ago, loved, and then got to re-read as part of my degree course.

In fact - I've just pulled it off the shelf just to check... Yes - it *is* the one I think it is. The narrative structure alone keeps things interesting (different parts of the story from different characters). It is presented as a mystery story and he is acknowledged as being one of the writers responsible for the development of crime/dective fiction I believe.

There is a reason why Collins was a friend of Dickens and they wrote together - because when Collins was on form - he was brilliant. It is this book and The Moonstone he is best known for. Both are worthy of a read.

On the other hand - Tolstoy's epics. *shudders* I've read both... Lets just say - I am not a fan.

I think I shall be stealing this list and checking just what I have and haven't read myself!

[serendu.livejournal.com]

Eh? Why am I not signed in? I am signed in on the previous pane and my current page! How odd!

Well, it was me who wrote that. *pokes LJ and demands 'What are you doing you silly thing?!'*

[ignavus.livejournal.com]

I've read 38 of 'em, most of them before I was 20. Haven't been reading anything non-technical for a while. :/

[avamclean.livejournal.com]

I've read 37 of these books and I do recommend: The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath, Brave New World - Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell. I have to say that Nineteen Eighty Four was by far my favorite because of his views on society and where it was heading.

[webtarkeena.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed 1984 as well.
Disliked "Tess of the D'urbervilles" and "Grapes of Wrath," both of which were required reading in HS lit classes.
I also started reading Crime and Punishment once upon a time, voluntarily. I got maybe 2-3 chapters in, decided I'd commit suicide if I was the main character, and put it down. Uggh. Russian literature is clearly not for me.

I recently read #58, "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime" - a fairly new book - and quite enjoyed it as well. A fascinating look inside the head of an autistic young man who decides to be a detective.

[vegmb.livejournal.com]

#72 was the first novel I ever read. But if you have seen the movie, it follows very closely. I ended up reading a lot of these because they were required for school.