A literature Meme
Bonnie tagged me for this meme. I found this a curious selection of literature in that there are plenty of other classics I have read and plenty listed here that I haven't, but I have a few ideas for further reading.
Here's how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog. The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.
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. One day.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee. Liked this one.
6 The Bible7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - so long ago though that I can hardly remember it.
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy.
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - A good many of them, but not all.
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. Who needs to read the book? I thought watching the movie was good enough.
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - No, Tender is the Night did not exactly convert me to F Scott.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - Only half. This is one of few books I didn't finish. Dickens is sooo verbose here. But I loved the BBC TV series.
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - It's on the shelf waiting for an extended hospital visit.
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - No, but seen the movie. Does that count?
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - Boy oh boy, did I ever.
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 - No but own the BBC DVD.
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Do these literary inquisitors not think that is part of the Chronicles of Narnia?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
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 - No. I own it, but never could bring myself to read it.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - It's on my shelf, I just haven't got there yet.
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
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 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
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - Saw the movie, if that counts.
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy. I started this and just wasn't up to more of that tearing angst between what one wants and what one ought to do and thought I needed a Hardy break, as I had just read A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Woodlanders, both of which I loved.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - I own it.
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. I own it.
80 Possession - AS Byatt - I tried, but have to say I found this book pretentious. Even as a zoologist I couldn't make it through those insect letters.
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 - No, but I read Tuesday's with Morrie.
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 - It's on my shelf.
I'll tag Drew, Ben and Craig, as there is another meme circulating the women I know out there, but feel free to ignore this.