08.03.08
Books I’ve Read
Well, because I’m a sheep, I thought I’d follow the crowd and do this as many of my friends have. I should probably preface this with the note that, when I was about 13, I went through an “intellectual” phase and read a LOT of classics. Until I realized that Charles Dickens must have been a very, very depressed man.
Here’s how it works:
1. Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2. Italicize those you intend to read.
3. Mark in red the books you LOVE. (Along with others, I’m boldly italicizing ones I love.)
4. Reprint this list in your blog.
1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - I know, I know. I keep meaning to read it, but I haven’t.
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - I’m an HP nerd.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible - I’ve read a good portion of it, but not all of it. I just finished going all the way through the New Testament, though.
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - I’m glad to know that everyone else thinks this is a horribly depressing story as well. I was afraid that, because I read it as a teenager, I didn’t “get” something.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - Part of me wants to read these, and part of me doesn’t.
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare - I’ve read a lot of his stuff, but not nearly all of it. Good gracious.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - I finally read this when Jeff was aghast at the fact that I’d never read any Tolkien. How I got out of school without having to read any of his works is beyond me.
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - One of my more recent reads.
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell - I read this book cover to cover about five times in a row the winter of 1992. Then I watched the movie multiple times. I may have been obsessed.
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - Probably one of the only “required reading” I had to do that I actually really liked.
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Everyone keeps telling me I should read this.
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh - The movie’s coming out soon. Maybe that’s a good excuse to read this.
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - Much like Dickens, I’m convinced Steinbeck was clinically depressed.
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - I want to know what Carroll was on when he wrote this. No, wait, I don’t.
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - I’m counting this, even though I technically didn’t read it. My mother read it to me when I was a child.
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - I haven’t read the entire Chronicles. Much to Jeff’s chagrin.
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - I read this for the first time in sixth grade as required reading. I did not enjoy it then. I re-read it a couple of years ago before the movie came back and I “got” it more, I think. It was quite enjoyable then.
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - I’ve heard such good things about this one. I want to read it.
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - I’m curious, but once again, the fact it was made into a movie starring Nicholas Cage kind of has me a bit skittish.
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell - I had to read it in HS. I hated it.
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - I may get my girl card taken away for admitting this, but I never read this, nor any other book in the series.
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 - Another recent read. Beatiful, haunting story.
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - Probably tied with P&P as my favorite Jane Austen book.
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - Ugh. This finally made me put down the Dickens and not pick any more up unless I was required to read it.
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 - I don’t mind books that make me cry. That said, I hated this one.
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
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - I know I’m so stereotypically female for saying this, but this book makes me cackle. So I read it a lot.
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
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 - I haven’t read this in a long time, but it was high on 8-year-old Adriene’s book list.
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90. The Faraway Tree Collection
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
So, we drove down the street, grabbed some Starbucks, then went to the nearest Kroger where we were about the fourth people in line.