Book meme

[naomi_jay]

Because tedious work is tedious.

Bold the ones you’ve read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you’ve read part of, and no cheating. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn’t count. Abridged versions don’t count either.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire- JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
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 (Yes, even the poems.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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
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
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 - 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
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
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 Inferno – Dante
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
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

On a personal note, I'd just like to add that I think The Time Traveller's Wife is a horrible book with appalling characters and I wish I could get back the two weeks I spent reading it.

Comments

[dwg.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I hate lists like this because I feel very ill-read afterward. I've seen a lot of the movie adaptions, though. I know these are beloved classics and examples of Great Literature, but the vast majority of them are just Not My Thing.

That said, The Three Musketeers is one of those books that I'm really glad I did read in its entirety. I remember sneaking it into the bathroom with me so I could read it in the tub.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I'm firmly of the opinion that most "classics" are books everyone wants to say they've read, but don't actually want to read. I got five pages into Moby Dick before I gave up. I hated Jane Eyre, and think anyone who married a man who keeps his wife locked in the attic deserves to be very unhappy in life. Tess of the D'ubervilles made me incredibly angry as she blatantly should have run off with Alec and given Angel-Clare the middle finger for being a hypocritical dickhead.

I do love Wuthering Heights because everyone in it is so crazy and mean and full of teh dramaz! And I love Life of Pi. The tiger is awesome!

[dwg.livejournal.com]

The movies are infinitely more enjoyable, at least to me, because it's only two hours of your life rather than having to deal with the prose of the day. Of course, the only reason why I watched Moby Dick was because I was stuck in an airport for 5 hours between flights. I've sat through all manner of things that I wouldn't ordinarily watch because it just so happened to be on tv. I steadfastly refused to read/watch Jane Austen and adaptions after being subjected to Emma/Clueless in high school, and yet I still wound up watching Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility. Alan Rickman and Colin Firth have a lot to answer for.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

You couldn't pay me to read Charles Dickens. With the exception of A Christmas Carol, I've hated everything of his I've ever read (and I infinitely prefer The Muppets' Christmas Carol to the book in any case). And confidentially I found Charlie and the Chocolate Factory to be incredibly sinister, and I hate the both films too.

[dwg.livejournal.com]

GENE WILDER IS CREEPY. SERIOUSLY. I love Roald Dahl books, and my year two teacher took to reading them to us in class. She started off easy with The Twits, but then moved onto The Witches, James and the Giant Peach, and the BFG (we had an assignment to make our own jar of dreams. I put so much paint in mine, it turned into a nightmare), and then Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Later in the year, we got to watch the movie and OH MY GOD WHY. I was seven-ish.

Course, then I went and read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator all on my own, but my seven-ish brain couldn't quite understand it.

But I do love that teacher for introducing me to Roald Dahl. We had her again the next year, and she read us Boy. I think she was related to Quentin Blake in some capacity? I'm not sure.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

Aside from George's Marvellous Medicine and Fantastic Mr Fox, I have no love of Roald Dahl. I think I'm missing a chromosome.

[molly-skye.livejournal.com]

Ooh I did this too and totally agree with you about Charles Dickens. Other "classics" I have managed to soldier through (namely War and Peace and Anna Karenina) but Dickens just gives me a migraine.
And might I recommend A Confederacy of Dunces? It was the first book I read this year and it brings teh awesome.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I'll check it out! The title alone intrigues me.

[esssjay.livejournal.com]

Oh yay for another person who didn't like TTTW. I once told someone that I didn't like the mc and found the whole thing annoying and she looked at me as if I'd admitted kicking a kitten.

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

High five! I was lent it by a friend who assured me it was the most romantic book ever. I hated the mc and thought the relationship aspect was creepy and disturbing, and totally curtailed the woman's free will. I also got the kicked-kitten treatment!

[spiderling.livejournal.com]

To Kill a Mockingbird is a great book. IO will gnaw my own arm off before I read anything else by Mellville- was forced in highschool to read Billy Budd- waste of paper except for the whipping scene. And I really don't like Hardy- so no Tess of the D'Ubervilles either.

I did read Great Expectations and it wasn't all that.

I love Jane Austin though, I will admit it. I lover her books!

[naomi-jay.livejournal.com]

I've got a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird somewhere in my epic TBR pile, and plan to get round to it someday!

[spiderling.livejournal.com]

It's pretty worth it. But I know how that TBR pile goes. I have a huge stack and end up lust getting library books.