Monday, February 16, 2009

The Year of the Book

Since this will be my first complete calendar year without grad school, I've decided to proclaim it The Year of the Book and focus on reading things I want to read instead of things I have to read. I'll write a bit more about that later, but I'm kicking it off with this that was sent by a friend via Facebook.

Classics - How many have you read...

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.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X+
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 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+++
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman* (haven't finished them!)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X+
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X+
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare* (Many, but not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier X+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger*
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch - George Eliott*
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X+
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X+
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy X
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
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 X+
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X+
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 Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+
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 X+
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan X+
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel X (not sure if I loved it, but it's definitely worth reading)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen X+
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X+
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 X+
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov *
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold X (again -- not sure I love it, but it's worth reading)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding X+
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 X
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 X +++++++
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X+
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 X+
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
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 *
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 X+
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo *

TOTAL READ: 47
TOTAL LOVED: 34 (books I have read more than once with much pleasure - likely to increase as I continue to re-read)
TOTAL PLAN TO READ: I'd like to eventually get around to all of them, but I starred the ones that I would go to first.

So . . . how 'bout the rest of you?

4 comments:

Stephanie said...

"The Year of the Book"--Rub it in, rub it in! Okay, you know this will show up my my blog later this week! :-) Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery . . .

McGee Family said...

I might have to do this too (you know, because I have SO much time to read!!). I would eventually like to read several on this list.
I am kind of surprised how much you loved Possession. I read it, and didn't hate it, but didn't love it either. Maybe it's because I had to read it for a class so had to read it quickly, and so I should re-read.
Dr. Organ also got me hooked on Ian McEwan. He is going to be in Dallas in March - I would love to go see him, but don't think it will actually happen.

Courtney said...

Good for you, Lisa!

I had tears of joy when I was finally able to go to the library and pick out what I wanted. I'm sure the librarian thought I was crazy, but she was still nice to me. ;-)

Of course, then I reached the shelf and was completely overwhelmed. I realized it had been so long since I could pick what I wanted, I didn't know what kind of fiction I liked. But, hey, it's been good to spend the last year and half figuring it out.

Sheila said...

I've read 35 of these, was too tired of counting to tally how many I loved.

I don't recommend reading On the Road. It's a "classic" about like knowing that the Romans used to eat so much they threw up and do many other disgusting, depraved things is "classical" knowledge!

When I finished my English degree, I didn't feel like reading anything, and didn't for a long time (except the things I had to read, again, for the training I was in....) I think the next fiction I read was Les Miserables, almost three years later.

Oh, and I did read The Secret Garden during that time. Chose it because it was available in English at Feltrinelli's bookshop. They had a small English section, and that was the only thing that appealed to me.

Happy reading!