The usual disclaimers, I don't usually do "memes," etc. But when it's books, it's hard to resist. I found this one over at Percival Blakeney Academy. The instructions are:
- Look at the list and bold those you have read—films don't count.
- Italicize those you intend to read. ("Intend" may be a little strong. How about "Would like to read someday, sometime.)
- Tag somebody if you like. (I don’t like to tag people. But I’d love to see other people’s lists and comments.)
I don't know who chose the books on the list, nor why. It seems varied enough, with books old and new, and several I've never heard of. And any book list that includes Swallows and Amazons gets big points as far as I'm concerned. It could only have done better by including George MacDonald. :) My comments follow in parentheses.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Absolutely one of the best series of books I’ve ever read. I have read them, and The Hobbit, see #16, innumerable times and get something more out of them every time. The movie misses nearly all that is wonderful about them.)
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I no longer remember anything about it, however, except a couple of house and moor images in my mind.)
- 1984 - George Orwell
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Again, I don’t remember a thing about it.)
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (What is it about books we’re forced to read in school? I remember nothing about this book either, only my anger in 8th grade that my class read The Caine Mutiny while the other was reading Catch 22, then the teacher made us read Catch 22 but let the other skip The Caine Mutiny. As a consequence, perhaps, I remember absolutely nothing about this one and little more about the other.)
- Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read some, but hardly all.)
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (See #2 above.)
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Unlike many folks, I wasn’t forced to read this in school, but I read it anyway because it is set in one of my home towns. If you’re not from Wayne, Pennsylvania, don’t bother; there’s nothing else redeeming about it.)
- The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I passed this up at a time when it was a big fad amongst my friends; I’ve seen the movie twice but it hasn’t given me any reason yet to want to read the book. Still, I think I might find it interesting for historical reasons.)
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (Saw the movie, can’t remember if I read the book or not.)
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Worth reading, if only to know where “So long, and thanks for all the fish” comes from.)
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Probably worth reading for cultural literacy reasons, but I don’t want to pollute my mind with its historical inaccuracies – the same reason I sometimes wish I hadn’t seen the movies Braveheart and Amadeus.)
- Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Don’t miss this.)
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Ditto.)
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (What I said about the movie version under #2, The Lord of the Rings, applies here as well. Read the books first for their own delightful sake, then read Michael Ward’s Planet Narnia for some amazing insights.)
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (I answered this one already, see #33.)
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (It’s on my list because Janet read it in Japan.)
- Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (On the recommendation of Janet’s English teacher; okay, but I wouldn’t recommend it myself.)
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (And all the others in the series as well.)
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I definitely don’t recommend this. Get the Cliff Notes version, so you can understand all the cultural references to it, but otherwise don’t subject yourself to it.)
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
- Dune - Frank Herbert
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley (I had to read it in school. I might like it more if I read it again.)
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
- Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
- Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (And many more of her books.)
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson (I don’t know anything about the book, bad Dad liked Bill Bryson, so that’s reason enough for me to italicize it.)
- Ulysses - James Joyce (I suppose I should want to read this, for cultural literacy reasons, but I never got past the first page. I read Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in school, and that was bad enough.)
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome (I love this series! It’s much too neglected these days. One reviewer dismissed it as being too unbelievable, because the siblings don’t fight. It gets worse – they love and respect their parents. What a shock. I’ve seen no better portrayal of competent, confident, independent children in which the adults are also competent, reasonable people. Besides, these are great stories. Warning 1: the stories are old, and there are one or two instances of words that were once acceptable in polite society which are no longer. Warning 2: reading these stories may give you an irresistible desire do go out and buy a sailboat.)
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - AS Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker (I read it when Heather was in high school. Don’t bother.)
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
- Charlotte's Web - EB White
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (First in French, then in English.)
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
- Watership Down - Richard Adams (You’ll never look at a rabbit the same way again.)
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - Shakespeare
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Mostly. The only version I was able to get at the time was slightly abridged; it was still plenty long, however.)
Some of the ones that are neither bolded nor italicized I have no intention of reading, but most are that way because I don't know anything about them. If there's one you recommend, please say so. And I'd love to see other people's lists. You can put one in a comment here, if you wish; if you make it a post in your own blog, please leave a link to it here.
I guess I should have looked at the list all the way through before I made another comment.
I have also recently read Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson. I loved it. It was very humorous and if you have spent any time in England, or perhaps even if you haven't, his take on the locals is quite amusing. I had read Theroux's Kingdom by the Sea and was very disappointed. He seemed to gripe about everything. Bryson's book was a lot of fun. I am looking forward to A Walk in the Woods.
I also have remembered that I read The Five People You Meet In Heaven by Mitch Albom. That was quite awhile ago. I knew I had read Tuesday's with Maurie and was thinking that was the only book of his I had read, but now I do recall reading 5 People.
So, my total is now up to...16.
Perhaps I'll pack The Hobbit for Maine.
I hope you love The Hobbit! I've read it more times than I can remember, and it's always delightful.
We just finished The Hobbit last night. We read it a couple years ago, and Jonathan remembered a number of the details, (I hadn't expected him to remember it, and I thought we had stopped part way through), but he was anticipating Smaug for a long time, and has been pretending to be a dragon a lot recently.
After Smaug died, Jonathan announced that the book was boring, and that he would fall asleep while I was reading. I said I didn't think he would, and so kept reading. I stopped at one particularly exciting part after that and said that since the book was so boring, we might as well stopped. Jonathan jumped up (from lying down in bed) and shouted, no, no, no! So, I guess it turned out better than he thought... (we've been talking about saying things hastily and being slow to speak, etc.)
Update: I have read #59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Thanks for that comment - it reminds me that I bought that at the Narita airport and have read it as well.
I've now read it, too, not that I recommend it much. Review coming soon.