Friday, June 27, 2008

Batting .333 in the Literary Game

I got this list of books from Jim's Blog. He got it from something called the Big Read. Whatever, I just love lists.

He did it so I figured I would as well. What the heck, it beats watching Fairly Odd Parents.

Instructions:
A) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
B) Italicize those you intend to read.
C) Change to blue the books you LOVE.
D) change the color to pink if you've seen the movie (and perhaps that's good enough for you).

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 (This might be my favorite book of all time.)
6 The Bible (Okay, I skipped a lot of "begats", but when you're on the campaign trail and you don't have a book, you read a lot of hotel bibles. Besides, my father the librarian told me to read it for my own literary health.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (Because we had to...)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (High school english class)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (High school again)
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ("What kind of name is Yossarian?")
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I'm not sure even my mother with a Masters in British Lit. has done this.)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Didn't like it. Holden Caulfield was an idiot.)
19 The Time Traveller'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 (42)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (My wife says it is one of the best books ever!)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (I own like four copies, love this book.)
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 (I'm with Jim, how did this get in here?)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
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 (The wife will be shocked by this)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (The best sci-fi of all time!)
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 (High school again)
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 (My wife read it, said it was good)
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (Ugh...it was a slog.)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (if you are wondering what's wrong with the world, note that this book made someone's top 100 books list.)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I tried...I swear.)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Loved this as a kid.)
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 (actually, I only saw the musical on stage, but that's kinda like a movie.)

For those of you keeping score at home, that's 33 I've actually read. Here are a few that I think should have made the list. I mean please, Bridget Jones' Diary? I offer the following for consideration instead:

Pillars of the Earth - Ken Follett (It looks so long but reads so fast.)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I've got the conch!)
The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway (Top 100 books and no Hemingway?)
Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut (Top 100 books and no Vonnegut? So it goes.)
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas - Hunter S. Thompson (A skewing of the American Dream.)
Green Eggs and Ham - Dr. Suess (Maybe the perfect book.)
The Hobbit - J.R. R. Tolkien (I actually like this one even more than the Rings books.)

There you go. Any suggestions for inclusion or deletion? Have at it kids.

5 comments:

Jim said...

I think that list they gave out kinda sucked. I think we should start our own lists. But my mind is so mushy, I'll never remember anything that isn't still on my shelf...

Anonymous said...

Got me beat by 10, but I didn't count the ones I Cliff Noted. Agree that Hemingway should be on there at least once, but I am partial to Cat in the Hat.

Anonymous said...

By the way, if you are up for a real challenge, see how you rank at http://johnandsheena.co.uk/books/1001books_arukiyomi.xls

The T-Dude said...

Jim - Agreed, kinda lame, but worth the discussion.

Mediatsar - I can see Cat in the Hat.

1001 books? Maybe once the kids are grown and the dogs die, until then, I'm lucky to get the chance to read the funnies in the john without getting interrupted.

Monster Paperbag said...

I loved Sherlock Holmes as a kid, too. In fact, I still do :).