Friday, July 04, 2008

the book meme

I've borrowed this book meme from Sarah's blog. I know she doesn't mind. It's a list of books and you are asked to:-

Bold - those you have read.
Italicize - those you intend to read.

I've put my own comments at the side where I felt compelled to say something.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - I really ought to read this one day!
2.The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - did this at school in my second year, then for A level
4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling - seen all the films - I know it doesn't count
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 - I've read quite a lot of the plays and some of the sonnets but I can't say I've read the complete works yet.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - keep meaning to read this.
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. 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
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 - seen the film, that'll do for me!
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 - as No. 38
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - the first Austen I ever read.
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - my first and favourite Dickens, read at school.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - again did this for A level, disliked it!
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

I always wonder who chooses these books and what insight it gives them? It is very random as there are many other wonderful books that aren't on the list. There is no Virginia Woolf to start with, no Oscar Wild, no Elizabeth Gaskell and no George Eliot to name just a few. Anyway, I guess ours it not to reason why. It must seem odd that I have read all the Jane Austen works listed except Pride and Prejudice, I must rectify that but I have seen so many adaptations of it I put it off because I know the story. Anyway, there you are; below are some of the titles from my book shelves you can tell how long I have had them from the book covers.


6 comments:

  1. I'm borrowing your book meme and will be right back!

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  2. you are very welcome, mibsy:)

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  3. I will be borrowing your list too -Hi haven't visited for a while - well have been reading but not leaving messages.
    My friend and colleague at work were just saying what makes us go along a list of book titles on a shelf and pick one and not the other - but its like blognames at the side of bloggers pages - what makes you choose to look at someone because of the title of their blog??

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  4. Hello Catherine,hope you enjoy doing the list. It is funny how some titles both in books and blogs appeal more than others isn't it?

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  5. Nice list! I was also surprised by the absence of some authors (why include J.K. Rowling and not Virginia Woolf?).

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  6. sarah, there is a load of authors I read and enjoy who aren't included - I find it incomprehensible that Woolf isn't there.

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