Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Long-ass book meme, from Heu Mihi

... because I clearly can't do any actual work during office hours.

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

I'll be using a lower-case x for partial reads, because I can't resist splitting hairs.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkein - X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X+
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible – x (I think I have read the vast majority of it at some point or other.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X+
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare – x (barring Timon of Athens and Henry VIII, which I really should get to one of these days)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - X
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks * (Picked this up at the thrift store, really should get to it)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot – X
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - X
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – X
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - X
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X+
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - X+
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (Man, I'm not doing well on the Russian novels.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - X
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - x (I've read two, I think; TLTWaTW was required reading in elementary school, and I'm pretty sure I read one of the others in college, when I went through a phase of really trying to like C.S. Lewis. It didn't work very well.)
34 Emma - Jane Austen - X
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - X+
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - X
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X+ (In fact, I think this may be the first "chapter book" that I ever read)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - X
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - X
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - X
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - X
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - X
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon (I've never even heard of this.)
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - X+
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon - X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - X
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold * (Another thrift-store pickup I've been meaning to get to)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - X
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – x (Got maybe 5/6ths of the way through, wrote a paper on it anyhow while pounding vodka screwdrivers and watching Pulp Fiction, got an A-. Sometimes I'm not sure I deserve my college degree.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - x (No, I didn't read all of it, and yes, I somehow faked my way through an exam on it in grad school. Hmm. Maybe I don't deserve my master's degree either.)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath - X
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - X
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - X
80 Possession - AS Byatt X
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - X
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - X
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - X
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Curiously, I'm only familiar with this one because the LibraryThing Unsuggester lists it as among the top five books that you will not like if you really, really like the Orlando Furioso. I have not tried the experiment, but I think this is probably true.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - X
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 – X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

5 comments:

heu mihi said...

Screwdrivers and "Pulp Fiction" probably *helped* with the Melville, actually....

Fretful Porpentine said...

They may have, indeed. My "if all else fails, relate everything to Shakespeare" policy for undergraduate papers definitely helped. (Sadly, it does not work as well if your actual topic is Shakespeare.)

Renaissance Girl said...

6 out of 100? really? do i have a TOTALLY skewed sense of what people in the world do with their time?

Fretful Porpentine said...

I have absolutely no idea how the BBC arrived at that figure, but I must admit that I would not be totally surprised if it were true.

Anonymous said...

You're not missing much with Shadow of the Wind. I read it for my book club. It's a Spanish soap opera. And not a very good one.

roaringgrrl