Book Meme

Because I've seen this making its rounds - well, around Diane and Emma -  I figured: well, why not?

But I warn you: it will be pitiful.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Underline those you intend to read.
3) Italicise the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (and most of the literature around it, like Tolkien's letters)
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (the usual version and The Street Bible, by Rob Lacey)
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 Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D 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
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres Mans
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 (and never again, the smug shallow git)
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’ 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 (though I prefer A Little Princess)
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 (Tuesdays with Morrie is even better)
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

A miserable 27/100.

A lot of them, I'd never heard of. A number of them, I have never been able to quite approach. I have trouble with classic literature, I think; things like Tolstoy and Dickens and Hugo. I try to not let that bother me, thinking that I might be a little less in the intellectual department for not having read them.

On the other hand I've grown up enough now to finally want to read Austen; I'd avoided it because when you do English Literature and 90% of the girls in your course are absolutely simpering over Austen, and insist you read her, you end up running a mile. Or ten, in my case. It wasn't until I watched the BBC series of Pride & Prejudice at Alice's that I decided I liked Austen for her very witty dialogue and her very sharp social commentary. Which I do regret having waited so long to discover. I blame my course-mates because they were into Austen for the romance, which is really not the point. Nice, but not what I would've liked her for. 

I find books and reading a bit of a difficult subject. I wonder and worry if what I read allows for assumptions to be made about me. I know it's daft, because when you were 'the weird kid' at school you worry about that sort of thing. Am I not open-minded enough? Do I fail at being intellectual? Who knows?

I guess these days I'm a little too selective of my reading. I spend more time reading materials that teach me, that I learn from - and this includes Empire magazine, because the articles are so well-written and -researched they're proper essays - and they hold my interest more than fiction. And when I do want to read fiction, I go back to books I love and enjoy. But thanks to the list above, and considering the number of books I underlined, the future of my reading doesn't look all that bleak.

Having said that, by my bed at the moment is Parky, and Jeremy Clarkson's Don't Stop Me Now. While the first is pretty harmless, I wonder what the second says about me...

Comments

[emmms]

These are the books (on this list) you have to read, and I promise you your life will be more enriched because of it:

Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

They're in the order I found them on the list, but they are each beautiful and terrifying and will shake you to the core of your being (in the best possible way).

[The sister-in-law]

Ha! I knew you'd come round - I have a whole shelf of Austen open to your perusal over Xmas