Another Book Meme

Geoff mentioned on his blog about another book meme, this one originating from the BBC. Nobody has tagged me, but I thought I'd give it a go.

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. It's a weird ecclectic list.

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. 

For me, '+' will mean that I not only intend to read the book, I actually already have a copy of it. I'm also going to add another entry: '-' will mean that I HATED it.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X+
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X+
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X+
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X+
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 X+
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 X+
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams X+
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh X
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X+
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
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 X
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 X
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell X+
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown X+
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 X
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
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X+
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon X+
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
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie *
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville X-
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson X+
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 X
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro X
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry *
87. Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
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 X+
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X-
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

If I've counted correctly that's 35 that I've read and 15 (17 really as one is a three book series) that I own and want to read. I need to start working on that. So many books, so little time.

Some people may ask why read a book if you are hating it. Well one of them (Moby Dick) was a class assignment. Why they force that kind of book done the throats of kids who are barely into their teens, I don't know. For others, I take the Magnus Magnusson (Mastermind) approach: "I've started so I'll finish". The undying hope that the book can only get better. It rarely does.

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( Feb 21 2009, 08:52:13 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink