Friday, August 08, 2008

Book List

(I got this from a friend's blog, so if there's misinformation here, I blame her! :)). Apparently the National Endowment for the Arts is concerned that most Americans have not read the "classic" literature on the following list. Well, mostly classics. I can't quite see how the Da Vinci code counts. I was curious to see how much I'd read, and how much more I'd like to read. So, for reference in reading the list, the titles in bold are the ones I've read, the italicized ones are books I'd like to read and the rest are . . . well, the rest. (I think my English major puts me at an unfair advantage.) By the way, I couldn't get the italics off the list I read previously, so some of the italics are mine, some are borrowed (but I tried to indicate which ones were not really ones I want to read!). So anything that's in bold and italics is something I read, but couldn't get the italics off of. (Don't ask me why the italics function wouldn't undo itself in blogger).

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
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 (actually, I'm not really interested in reading this, but I can't get the italics off).
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (many, 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 (started, never finished)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens (wonderful movie by the BBC)
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 (I read an edited version, does that count?)
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 (I've read parts, and some in Hungarian, but not all)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (for my sins, yes, I've read it)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving (Justin made me--he read Middlemarch in exchange)
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-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
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (hated it, Hardy at his most depressing)
68 Bridget Jones's 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 (but I've read other Bill Bryson stuff)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (maybe)
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (no, but I've read Tuesdays with Morrie)
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

By my count, that's fifty-one I've read (if I'm counting right, which of course I may not be). Not too bad, I think! (Although the literary snob in me wishes I could claim more and the rest of me, which rather resents literary snobbery, thinks I shouldn't care at all what some list says about me).

4 comments:

Topsy said...

Isn't there such a thing as a literary connossier, someone who enjoys consuming literature for the sheer pleasure of the education and doesn't at all consider whether or not that is snobby. If not I vote - not caring at all what some list says about you. You ROCK!

Jenilyn Collings said...

Did you realize that the list has both the complete works of Shakespeare and Hamlet? Isn't that a bit redundant?

I've only read 28 (assuming that I've counted correctly and can actually remember what I've read), but I have read one that you haven't. I'm so proud of myself!

megandjon said...

so many comments!!!!

1) I've read most of the complete works of shakespeare, but didn't think i could count it if it wasn't all. silly me, i should've.
2) I totally agree about Jude the Obscure. I own that book and just can't finish it, it's so depressing.
3) At first I was proud of my 38, and then I decided that for an english major that was probably low, and then decided that this was a stupid list--very heavily weighted toward British authors. So much Dickens and Austen and no Twain, no Hemingway, no Wharton, no slave narratives (I've read a rididulous amount of those!)
4) BUT! lists are always kind of fun, I think!

Amelia said...

Way to go, Rosalyn! I like that idea - I'm a list kind of girl! I'll be posting my own edition of that soon ... which in blog terms for me means the next 6 months. :)