Monday, September 01, 2008

The Hundred Books Meme

I've seen a few versions of this around. The Ironic Catholic posted it last week and, as I haven't posted anything in a while, I decided to play. Besides, I was curious to see how I'd do.

Bold--I've read it.
Italics--I want to.
Nuttin'--I don't care.
Dripping with blood--you give it to me, I'll burn it instead.

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 (Have read most of it)
7. Wuthering Heights --Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Phillip Pullman (Wouldn't burn it, and am mildly curious, but wonder if all the hype is merely because of the thinly-disguised atheist prosletyzing
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (But it's been a while)
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott(Ditto)
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (Selection for HS senior lit class)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (Checked the Table of Contents on my copy and worked out that 17 plays, the sonnets, and The Rape of Lucrece are under my belt already!)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (Sorry, not familiar)
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - (Sorry, I guess I'm a modern fiction illiterate)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot (Read about a third of the way in, years ago)
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I'm in Georgia--had I not read it already, I think it's required by law)
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (Not sure I want to. Generally use it as a metaphor for any exhaustingly long written work.)
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Along with the various sequels.)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (At eighteen. Want to read again as I think I missed a lot of the religious aspects.)
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Hon Daughter #1's a Dostoyevsky fan and assigned me The Grand Inquisitor last spring.)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll –(A favorite)
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Parts, if not all)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen (Made daughters watch the movie. Should have made Son #1 watch it too, before he started fancying himself a matchmaker.)
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (Read & liked A Thousand Splendid Suns, but my bro tells me this one is a bit two-dimensional.)
37. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres – (Not sure if I want to--the title is intriguing.)
38. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
39. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (Several times)
40. Animal Farm - George Orwell (Though I guess it's a period piece now.)
41. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Mildly curious because of the hype & the fact that I've encountered too many people who actually consider it historical.)
42. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Got about halfway in, once. Suspect that a better knowledge of South American history or at least Cliff's Notes would make it easier to follow.)
43. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
44. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
45. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
46. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
47. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood (Somewhat curious, but it would probably make me mad.)
48. Lord of the Flies - William Golding (I've read part--but it's been a while.)
49. Atonement - Ian McEwan
50. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
51. Dune - Frank Herbert (Another period piece.)
52. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
53. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
54. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
55. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
56. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
57. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
58. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Nice Holmesian hat tip, though.)
59. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Another HS assignment.)
61. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold (Somewhat curious; don't think I could stand the subject matter)
64. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (Years ago)
65. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
69. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Read several chapters as a kid; couldn't get through the long days at sea. Would like to try again.)
70. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Read Classics Illustrated version as a kid.)
71. Dracula - Bram Stoker (You have got to be kidding!)
72. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
73. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
74. Ulysses - James Joyce (Did read Dubliners in college, though, which was all right.)
75. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
76. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
77. Germinal - Emile Zola
78. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
79. Possession - AS Byatt
80. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (Read, seen play, used gallons of Final Net on daughter's hair to form ringlets for darn play--really love the Muppets' version best, though.)
81. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
82. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
83. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
84. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert (Probably ought to.)
85. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
86. Charlotte's Web - EB White
87. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (Intriguing title.)
88. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (Have read some of the stories.)
89. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
90. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (Will need to be duct taped to a chair and have eyes held open with toothpicks before I watch Apocalypse Now, though.)
91. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
92. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
93. Watership Down - Richard Adams
94. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (Bro recommended it--but then he sent me Straight Man by Richard Russo for Christmas.)
95. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
96. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (But it's been a while.)
97. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
98. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Ought to--but oh, my, is it long!--Read the Classics Illustrated as a kid and saw the musical. Will that do?)
9. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain (HS)
100.The Outsiders -S. E. Hinton, I presume. (Upper ES)

I note that nothing here got marked in red. That's partly because I'm not that technically savvy, but partly for philosophical reasons. While I wouldn't recommend every book out there indiscriminately, there is little I'd torch (to include much that is badly written and badly researched.) It's good to know your enemy, and what better way to gain info that to read what he/she writes?

Few read this blog, but if you happen upon this feel free to play.

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1 Comments:

Blogger The Ironic Catholic said...

Hear hear! Readers unite!

7:01 PM  

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