Okay, so yes, I'm an English Lit major and yes, there are about a billion books that I should have read by now that I have not read. Such is life. I recently decided that I'll just have to accept my somewhat sketchy taste and my incompleteness. I recently read The Road because I should have read it, but I don't feel any better of a person for it. (I forced myself to finish it just before we left for vacation, but I also decided that I'll leave off of the Cormac McCarthy for the rest of this lifetime.) However, I'm also currently reading Eat, Pray, Love and I'm loving it so far. So, this is just a rambling preamble (haha) to a list posted by and borrowed from Poke. I was going to wait until I was rested and coherent, but I wanted to post a booksale notice.
Grassroots books is having a sale this weekend. We might go again if we're not zombie people.
Anyway, here's my list. The bolded ones, I've read. The italicized ones, I've not finished. (Notice that I don't have many that I've begun and not finished. One of my compulsions is finishing books I've started even if I dislike or despise them...see my The Road comment above. (I'll take The Handmaid's Tale any day.) I recently started reading The Secret Garden to Pic and it will take forever until we're finished.) Oh, and according to Poke's blog: The average adult has read only 6 of the following books!
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
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read a lot of the plays and ALL of the sonnets…thanks to class a year ago)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveler’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 Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
37. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
P.S. That this list is only 98 long bothers me. At least it could be 99, which is the number of a very good year.
P.P.S. Who put this list together? Why are some books on here while others are missing?
P.P.P.S. Anyone who knows how to change the text color within a post (other than for links) please let me know. I can't figure it out right now. I'm beyond exhausted. I can barely type this right now. Grazie mille.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
list of shame
Posted by v at 01:15
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4 comments:
Ok, the color thing is in the texty thing up there. It looks like a little box of colors toward the leftish corner. I tried to bold mine but apparently, all of the text on my blog is bold and so it didn't help much. :)
As for the 98 thing, it bugged the crap outta me as well. When my friend first posted it, it had the number as 100, but there were only 98. That bugged me even more. So I investigated and in the original list Hamlet and The Loin, The Witch, and The Wardrobe were listed. They were taken off because The Complete Works of Shakespeare and The Chronicles of Narnia were already on the list. So, now only 98. I think we should come up with two more to put on the list. Thing that can make people feel more successful. Like, ummm, what is something that almost everyone has read? Call of the Wild? Black Beauty? The Little Princess?
Oh, and to end this crazy long novel of a comment, yes, you can absolutely re-post. It wasn't my post to begin with and the whole point is to spread the word. ;)
I only use "edit HTML" when I want to put in a name for a link (I haven't figured out how to do that in "compose" mode). Other than that, I'm pretty much always in "compose" mode. Glad I could help. :)
I've read 42 of them. Not bad, considering "most" other adults have only read 6. And I love the first comment that your friend Kate made. The Chronicles of Narnia now have a completely different connotation in my mind. I just wonder who's loin is with the witch and wardrobe. :D
Okay, I've got 44, but I'd like to know who made this list. It seems a bit...weird? This is the list I've been using:
http://www.randomhouse.com/modernlibrary/100bestnovels.html
I like that it has critics' and readers' choices.
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