Basically the rules are thus. Below is a list of classic books.
You are supposed to:
Look at the list and:
- Bold those you have read.
- Italicise those you intend to read.
- [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
- Reprint this list on your own blog.
Although I should be doing some work, I shall, nevertheless, indulge in this quickly.
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
- [The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien]
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
- Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
- The Bible [well, most of it—know your enemy and all that...]
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
- [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]
- [His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman]
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
- Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
- Complete Works of Shakespeare
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
- The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
- Middlemarch - George Eliot [If there were a way to mark the books that you utterly loathe and think that you could make a good argument for being a load of crap, then this would definitely be marked so.]
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
- The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
- [Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh]
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
- [Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll][although I prefer Through The Looking Glass.]
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
- [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis] [and, again, I prefer his sci-fi trilogy. More obviously religion-based, but more interesting for all that. Besides, That Hideous Strength is possibly the greatest book title ever.]
- Emma - Jane Austen
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis [haven't we done this?]
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
- Winnie-the-Pooh - AA Milne
- [Animal Farm - George Orwell]
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
+++ UPDATE +++
Whilst anally converting these to properolformat, I noticed that 44 is also missing. So, I am going to add in another favourite of mine.- [Alms For Oblivion series - Simon Raven]
+++ /UPDATE +++- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins [The Moonstone is far superior.]
- Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
- [Lord of the Flies - William Golding]
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
- This one seems to have gone missing, so I shall add in [Fire and Hemlock - Dianna Wynne-Jones], which is simply astonishing. But then, she is one of the best writers in the English language.
- 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
- 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
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
- Ulysses - James Joyce [almost as crap as Middlemarch.]
- The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
- Germinal - Emile Zola
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
- Possession - A. S. Byatt
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
- 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
- [The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks] [I prefer his sci-fi work: Use Of Weapons, The Player of Games and Look To Windward are just brilliant.]
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare [again, haven't we done this?]
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
I'm not going to pass this on because I'm too lazy. Do feel free to pick it up and run with it if it pleases you to do so though...
9 comments:
You will enjoy reading Brave New World if you get around to it. Allow me to recommend Huxley's other work, all of which is excellent. Especially "Island".
Also, if you haven't read the less famous Orwell, do go & explore it.
No love for The Fountainhead?
Bit of a cop out to lump all Shakespeare's work in together, and the whole Bible too... I'd have settled for just one of the testaments rather than the whole trilogy.
Plus, who thought some books should be in there anyway? Parts of it seem like a snobbish collection, definitely intended only for "real intellectuals" with the odd concession for the plebs.
Not nearly enough pleasurable junk in there for me.
Is there no key for 'started reading it on the recommendation of people who were obviously insane' or 'got half-way through before hurling it at a wal'..?
No Philip K Dick?
Possession is an interesting read - an insight into earnest undergraduate feminist thought processes: all the men are 2 dimensional or twerps or sometimes both. The poetry is gruesome - I left it.
I could never get to grips with LotR, it seems to me to be like a boring road movie. Even the films were pointless.
Also no Solzhenitsyn.
"Also no Solzhenitsyn."
And now he's dead...
DK
You didn't italicize Confederacy of Dunces, so I'm assuming that that means that you have not read it and do not intend to read it. But I have read it, and although I would have stopped reading it after the first chapter or two if it had not been so highly recommended to me, by the time I had read the first 50 pages I could NOT put it down. It ended up being one of the top 10 or 20 books that I have ever read.
I must say that I admire anybody who has read LOTR. I have tried several times, but have never made it past the first few chapters. Does it get a lot better as it progresses? I have noticed that nearly everyone who thinks that LOTR is great is male. I am female. Is LOTR too guy-oriented for most women?
Yes, LOTR gets better. After spending the first half of the first book describing the flowers by the side of every footpath that the hobbits follow, Tolkien picks up the pace a bit.
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