Book meme stolen from Contradictacat

[breakinglight11]

Instructions: Look at the list and put an X after those you have read.

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) I enjoy them, but I don't think they're very good.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (x)
6 The Bible (x) I don't care who you are, you should know the Bible.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte ( )
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (x) Wasn't terribly impressed.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (x)

Total so far: 8/10

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (x)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy ()
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ()
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (x)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier ( )
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (x)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (X) Didn't like it, everyone else does, though
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (x) This is too recent and not nearly on the caliber of the others to be in this grouping
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( )

Total so far: 12/20

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell ( )
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (x) Another one everyone loves but me.
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens ( )
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy ( )
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (x) I don't think I always get it.
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( ) 
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (X) I keep trying to like Steinbeck, but he never quite does it for me.
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X) Heh. Oh, yes.
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (X) LOVE talking animal books.

Total so far: 17/30

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy ( )
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (x) One of the most important works of my life as a writer, as a Christian, and as a human being.
34 Emma - Jane Austen ( )
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (x) Why is this and the whole series on here?
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ()
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden () What the hell is up with these groupings?
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X) What?

Total so far: 21/40

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (x) It hurts me to read this.
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X) Hated it.
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (X)
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 ( )
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (x)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (x)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan ( )

Total so far: 25/50

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
52 Dune - Frank Herbert ( ) Despite being the only nerd in my family, I am the only one who hasn't read and isn't an ENORMOUS fan of this
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 (x) Love, love, LOVE this book. My favorite Dickens.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ()
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )

Total so far: 26/60

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (x) Again, I kept trying to like 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 ( ) Always loved the title, though.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (X)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (X) My dad read this to me when I was a kid for the first time. He loves it. Particularly chapter 86, The Tail.

Total so far: 29/70

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (x)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76 The Inferno – Dante (x) Adore it.
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80 Possession - AS Byatt ( )

Total so far: 33/80

81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (x) Adore it. It's brilliance is almost overshadowed by its popularlity, if you can believe it.
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (x)
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker ( )
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro ( ) Again, love the title.
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 Albom ( )
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (x) Huge fan. Read them all.
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )

Total so far: 37/90

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (x) Hated it.
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery ( )
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams (x) One of the two contenders for my favorite book of all time.
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (x)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (x) Heh. I've got a fondness.
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo ( )

Total: 42/100
 
Wow, stupid score. But frankly, I find this a very suspect list. I consider myself to be fairly well-read. Perhaps I'll make my own.

Comments

[koboldninja-5.livejournal.com]

I think I counted up 34 that I have read, but I don't think that makes me particularly unread, simply that I wasn't forced to read a lot of the classics in high school and from there haven't taken, well, any literature courses. That said, lit courses usually ruin books for me.

I also have I think six or seven more of the books sitting on my shelf in the to-read category. And as to how much you like something, I think a lot comes down to taste--as you mentioned with Steinbeck. For one I can't stand Dickens in the least, his writing simply drives me up the wall.

Now I would be interested to see some home-brew lists of books people should read, noting how many are duplicates from both this (or similar lists that circulate). I would also be interested to see a list only of those you can personally vouch for and including some that you mean to read or would be willing to believe should be read--for me, I would put something like War and Peace, which I keep meaning to get to, but haven't actually read yet. I would also put some of the books I hate--I full well believe everyone should read Oliver Twist and Tale of Two Cities, even if I can't stand them.

Anyway, some thoughts.

The you in the above paragraph is not you, but the generic.

You (specific) should read Catch 22. It is wonderful.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

I think a homebrew list may be in order. I may just make one.

[koboldninja-5.livejournal.com]

I started working on one while I was doing laundry this afternoon =)

We will have to compare notes.

[morethings5.livejournal.com]

Why did Animal Farm hurt you? Did you not like it or did it just make you sad to see all the animals fighting?

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

It just made me so sad. Poor Boxer.

[koboldninja-5.livejournal.com]

Okay, so I just read Animal Farm. Really good. Poor Boxer, but more poor Snowball. Perfectly demonstrates communism, the early Soviet State and even Russia today. Lenin warned people not to let Stalin take over...

[londo.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this meme is... suspect. That's a good word for it.

Also, dude, lj-cut.

[breakinglight11.livejournal.com]

Yeah, yeah, I know. They just always seem to screw up the formatting for me, so I kind of don't like them.

[londo.livejournal.com]

The trick seems to be that, when you go to the full entry, LJ ignores the tag, but parses the whitespace just fine - so if you put it on its own line, you'll have more empty lines than you want.

[gizmo224.livejournal.com]

I've... read five of those in their entirety, and three partially (i.e. I've read two books out of the Narnia series). But then, I'm well aware I don't read much. Two books I have read and aren't on there, though. Those being Ender's Game and Good Omens.

*shrug*