Friday, September 4, 2009

Well Read? Well...

I have a shelf below my night stand, full of books unread. The top of my nightstand, more books, read, unread and half-read. I have a box of books in my room that I have either read and forgotten I read them, or I haven't read yet. Several shelves in my livingroom bookshelf, unread (lovely gifts from my lovely friend who recently moved away). Books on the floor, waiting to be read or re-shelved. I just requested three books from ILL and ordered three from Better World Books. I have books. I read books. I want to read more books.

But have I read the books I should have read (according to the BBC, which reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books below)? I found this meme on ZookBookNook and thought I'd give it a go to test my well-readness. If you want to give it a try, just:

1) Look at the list and make those you have read bold.
2) Star (*) the ones you LOVE.
3) Italicize those you plan on reading.

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 (I read the first two)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee*
6 The Bible (I read some of it in Catholic school--obviously--and some in Western Civ.)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte*
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell (I read it in 7th grade and did not get it at all--may possibly have read only the first and last sentence of every paragraph)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (I plan on reading something Dickens soon)
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott *
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller (I was in Washington DC the week we read this in AP English)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (King Lear, Julius Caesar, Othello)
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 (just couldn't do it)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (again...painful)
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 Berniere
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 (worst. book. ever.)
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 (my sister just gave me a copy of this)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood*
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel*
2 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 (just can't make myself like Steinbeck)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (read half, was disturbed, will try again)
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 (I start it every December, but don't get very far)
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker*
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro* (finally just read it! I know...shameful)
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

Hmmm...only 28 that I've read all the way through (though much more respectable than 6)...and quite a few that I have no interest or intention of reading (and a number I've never heard of or should look into...add them to the list). How many have you read?

4 comments:

  1. If I kept count correctly, I've read 39 (more of the children's ones than you marked, I think - I'm a kidlit reader). Additionally, I tried, really tried, to read Ulysses and never could get through it. I tried A Confederacy of Dunces and hated it and stopped. Many look interesting to me - so many books, so little time!

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  2. I just noticed that I did NOT read Rebecca (yet), but DID read Lord of the Flies, which doesn't change my total at all...also wondering at the absense of a number of authors, such as Mark Twain...surely we should all have read Huckleberry Finn???

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  3. I've read 30, maybe 33, and half of Brideshead Revisite, seen the PBS version (not the recent movie) twice.
    You would think that they would have T. Sawyer and H. Finn (I've read both)

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  4. Rats. Just copied the whole list into the comments box. Did the HTML drudgery for the books I'd read and want to read and dear ol' blogger said I can't post more than 4,096 characters. Since I have no idea how many characters that is, I give up.

    Mostly I love computers, blogs and everything digital. Just now, not so much.

    Anyway, I've read a ton of these, want to read a few, like G. G. Marquez, and loved Life of Pi, Herman Melville and anything by Thomas Hardy. Hope you get to Jude soon, Andrea. It's sedate and stately and sweet.

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