I blog therefore I meme

[telophase]

The Big Read meme that's been going around.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.


You'll note I don't actually intend to read any of the ones I haven't already read. I used to intend to read most of the Great Books of the world, but eventually realized that if I picked them up and flipped through them, or read the description of them, that the reason I hadn't already read them is that they sounded really boring. :)

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 (The Golden Compass) - (2/3 of)
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 - ok, bits here and there, not the *whole* thing
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 - Haaaaaaate it. Hate with a deeeeep and abiding passion
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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No, but I read The Moonstone, do I get partial credit?
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 - Thought it was mostly boring twaddle
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

Comments

[ninja-tech.livejournal.com]

It is always interesting seeing what books other people have read and which ones they really loved! I think we have a little bit different tastes in books. *laughs* Next time you ask for recommendations, I'll remember that. XD

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Yup. Depressing books? Hate 'em. Modern books where characters obsess over careers and relationships? Hate 'em. Books that thwack you over the head with a Message or are obviously designed to fix a stare on some Aspect of Society? Hate 'em.

Funny? Yup, especially if it's dry self-deprecating sarcasm.

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

You might like Catch-22.

[fuchsoid.livejournal.com]

It's a shame there is no way of conveying that although I've read On The Road, Midnight's Children and Jude the bloody Obscure, I loathed them.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

You just reminded me: I have read On the Road. And thoroughly loathed it. *goes to bold*

I wish there was a way to put "attempted to read, bounced off hard".

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

What is Notes From A Small Island? See, everything else on your 'love' list I also love, and I've never even heard of that one.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

If you haven't read anything by Bill Bryson and like snarky, self-deprecating humor, he's your guy. He's done several travel books, and tends to picture himself as the bumbling American bulling his way through the international china shop, making snarky commentary about everything along the way. Notes is about a trip he did around England shortly before he and his family moved back to the States.

Some people can't see past the snark to see his love and affection for (most of) the places he visits, but as I tend to have exactly his attitude myself, I love it. :D His website currently has an excerpt from his memoirs posted (http://www.randomhouse.com/features/billbryson/bb_title/display.pperl?isbn=9780767919364&view=excerpt), to get a rough idea of his writing. (I haven't read the book yet, as I gave it to my Mom for Christmas and plan on stealing it from her when I go to her house, provided she's finished it.)

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

That excerpt explains a lot about some of my Wisconsin inlaws' eating habits, actually.

*puts book on to-be-read list*

[droiche.livejournal.com]

Oh yay. So I'm not the only person I knew who was underwhelmed by some of the so-called great books. =-P

I scored 26/100 completely read or partially read from this list. I noticed most of the books I was assigned for literature classes aren't included. Nor are the majority of the classics I read for myself. -_-

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I read a lot of the classics on my own - Lord of the Flies was forgotten in my parents' car by a friend of mine who was assigned it for class, and I found it on a long-distance trip, thought "This is supposed to be a classic," and read it. And totally didn't get it. XD 1984 and Animal Farm were much the same sort of thing.

Anyway GAAAAAH how can they make a list like this and put on Harry Potter but leave off Kipling, I ask you?!

[droiche.livejournal.com]

*nods* I actually adored 1984. Read it purely for pleasure 4 times. Ha ha. I was disappointed that Slaughterhouse 5 wasn't on here. Y'know, I might be more interested in Harry Potter if it weren't so blazing over-hyped. ^_~

Hoo boy. The book I absolutely hated was John Steinbeck's The Pearl. Seriously, I threw that book across the room when I finished it and wrote why I hated it in my class journal or whatever for it. I think I got an A. X-D


I'll always be fond of The Hobbit and LOTR. My grandma got me into those before I was even old enough to be assigned novel length books in school. ^_^

[seawolf10.livejournal.com]

No H.P. Lovecraft? No Ambrose Bierce? No Poe? List fails.

Save yourself some aggravation, don't ever read Catch-22, Tale of Two Cities, or Moby Dick. (To be fair, Moby Dick's not bad, but Melville packed so much unnecessary detail and dead-end plot threads into it that it's twice as long as it should have been.)

It's my firm opinion that many "classics" are "classics" because generations of English teachers suffered through them as children, and decided as adults to share the misery with the next generation.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

Obviously a rite of passage rather than a education. :D