Monday, August 03, 2009

I see your un-read novels list, and I raise you!

Supposedly, the BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this. Look at the list and put an 'X' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.


1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - (saw the flick)
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - X
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - No
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - No
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6. The Bible - X (NAS)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - No
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - No
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - X (read in 2002 and remember almost nothing)
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - X
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - No
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - No
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - No
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - X (the high school standards: Julius Cesar, Hamlet, Romeo-n-Juliet (the censored version)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - No
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - X (junior high)
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - No
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - X (multiple times, was on Elko County H.S.'s banned list)
19. The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - No
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot - No
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - No
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - X (but I don't remember much)
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens - No, but read parts of Oliver Twist and Christmas Carol
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - No
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - No, started to, lost interest
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - No
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - X (again, don't remember much)
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - No
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - X (loved this when I was 12)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - No
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - parts of it
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - X (over and over again from age 11 to 16)
34. Emma - Jane Austen - No
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen - No
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X (yes, yes!)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - No
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - No
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - No (dominant paradigm sexual fantasies put me to sleep)
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - X
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - X (another one I barely remember)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - No
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - No, but I read "The World According to Garp" and started "A Widow for One Year"
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - No
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - No, but I remember my mom reading me this
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - No
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - X, yes, YES!
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X, Golding was one of my favorite, also read two other books of his
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan - No
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel - No
52. Dune - Frank Herbert - X, two or three times
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - No
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - No
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - No
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - No
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - No
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - X, another I barely remember
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - No
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - No
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - X
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - No, but I saw the more recent movie and really liked it
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt - No
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - No
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - No
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac - X, YES!
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - No
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - X, and I read "Edge of Reason" and laughed till I peed
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - X, yes, love Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville - No
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - X
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker - No, but I've read like every other single vamp story out there
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - No
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson - X, YES! And his other books
75. Ulysses - James Joyce - No
76. The Inferno - Dante - No, but parts of it
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - No
78. Germinal - Emile Zola - No
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - No
80. Possession - AS Byatt - No, but I own the DVD and have read one of her other books
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - X
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - No
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker - No, but I read FIVE of her other books
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - No
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - No
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - No
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White - X, but don't remember it
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - No
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - No
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - No
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - No, but have read parts/excerpts
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint - Exupery - X, but I don't remember it
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - No but I've read one of this others
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams - X, in fact just re-read it for the sixth time this Xmas
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - No, but I really should
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - No
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - No
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare - X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - No
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - No

Actually read: 29 ... I'm gonna say 28 1/2 just because

On my list and in the house: Hardly any of them. I'm a creative minimalist ... plus I took a painful trip to the used book store in May and unloaded almost two full boxes of paperback and hard bounds I'd been hauling around since before college.

4 comments:

Jammer said...

You should absolutely read "Lolita." It's one of my favorite books ever.

On this list, some of my favorites are Lolita, Animal Farm, and Lord of the Flies. I also enjoyed DaVinci Code and Curious Case of the Dog at Midnight.

Apparently, I need to read Dune, and I have Confederacy of Dunces, which has been recommended to me many times.

If you were to make your own list, what would you change?

Mz M. said...

Maybe I'll read "Lolita" some day. I was pretty surprised with the film (with Jeremy Irons) and supposedly they stuck pretty close to the book. I'm just real tired of Dominant Paradigm authors and their fantasies.

Yeah, you would like "Dune" and you'd like the sequels too, although after book three it gets weird.

And I should read "Confederacy of Dunces" too, simply because of what happened to the writer, his mother's struggle to get it published, etc.

What would I change? I'd have a lot more female writers and a lot less dominant paradigm penis owners. I'd have included more than just one of Margaret Atwood's novels and more than just one of A.S. Byatt's. They're both top of their league, esp. Atwood.

I don't know that Tolkien is worthy of more than one reference, I don't think his writing was that good.

And speaking of penis-owning Dominant Paradigmers, where's Mark Twain??? Or Henry James? Or William Burroughs? Or Russell Banks or Cormac McCarthy???

Mz M. said...

Oh, and before I forget, I'd have to include at least one Don DeLillo because he's the Uber Intellectual contemporary author. And probably I'd have to include one of Thomas Pinchon's blathering, meandering novels because he's also considered Literature with a capital-L.

And where is Vonnegut in this? He's another uber surrealist-spec-fiction writer that deserves mention.

Jammer said...

Yeah, Vonnegut is probably my favorite author. It's a sin that he's omitted here.

Someone else told me I should really read Dune, so I guess I'll get around to it some day.

Just when I thought I'd narrowed my grasp a little...