I have met people who brag of never having read a book. How sad!
This comes via igetpissed, via Nullifidian, via the BBC
Instructions:
1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.
5. I added a '-' for those that I ploughed through (mostly as a teen), but HATED (probably because literature is wasted on the young).
My reading list:
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
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (quit at ¾ - boringly aimless book, but I'll probably finish it when I run out of reading matter.)
6. The Bible (God no! Bad fiction: ridiculous moralistics; inconsistent, unbelievable plot)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X+
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X+
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X- (I also disliked Vonnegut's books)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot X (I preferred Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss)
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 (Started, but quit. Blah and Bore, more like)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh * (enjoyed The Loved One)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky * X-
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34. Emma - Jane Austen *
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+ (fast and fun)
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 X+
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert X
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
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
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 X+
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X+
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I survived Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. Ulysses is not a work of creative genius, it’s the stream of consciousness of a person with DID - it's simply that the critics do not know this.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X----
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker X+
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X+ (preferred Family Matters)
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 X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X-
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams X+
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X+
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
What is not on the list that ought to be?
1984 by George Orwell.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is beautifully written.
Anything by Patrick White, Anita Rau Badami.
Apropos to the topic of reading books, I stumbled across an article about how the Internet is influencing the way that we process information. Ironically, I found the full article excessively wordy, but it was interesting, nonetheless.
This comes via igetpissed, via Nullifidian, via the BBC
Instructions:
1. Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2. Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3. Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4. Tally your total at the bottom.
5. I added a '-' for those that I ploughed through (mostly as a teen), but HATED (probably because literature is wasted on the young).
My reading list:
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
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (quit at ¾ - boringly aimless book, but I'll probably finish it when I run out of reading matter.)
6. The Bible (God no! Bad fiction: ridiculous moralistics; inconsistent, unbelievable plot)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X+
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X+
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy X+
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller X- (I also disliked Vonnegut's books)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X+
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot X (I preferred Silas Marner and Mill on the Floss)
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 (Started, but quit. Blah and Bore, more like)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh * (enjoyed The Loved One)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky * X-
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X+
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens X
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34. Emma - Jane Austen *
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+ (fast and fun)
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 X+
48. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding X+
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert X
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
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
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 X+
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov X
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas X
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy X+
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens X+
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce (I survived Portrait of the Artists as a Young Man. Ulysses is not a work of creative genius, it’s the stream of consciousness of a person with DID - it's simply that the critics do not know this.)
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray X----
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens X
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker X+
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry X+ (preferred Family Matters)
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 X
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X-
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams X+
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute X+
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
What is not on the list that ought to be?
1984 by George Orwell.
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque.
The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy is beautifully written.
Anything by Patrick White, Anita Rau Badami.
Apropos to the topic of reading books, I stumbled across an article about how the Internet is influencing the way that we process information. Ironically, I found the full article excessively wordy, but it was interesting, nonetheless.
“Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet.”Full article: Is Google Making Us Stupid? What the Internet is doing to our brains, by Nicholas Carr. Atlantic, July/August 2008
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