Meme a Little Meme For Me

Copied from Mean Louise, and tickling the back of my memory like I may have done this before, I bring you a book meme.



Instructions:



  • Look at the list and bold those you have read.

  • Underline those you intend to read.

  • Italicise the books you LOVE.

  • Reprint this list so we can try and track down these people who’ve read number 6 and force real books upon them.


    • 1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen

    2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

    3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I read “The Eyre Affair” by Jasper Fforde, does that count?)

    4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling

    5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

    6. The Bible

    7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

    8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

    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

    14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (OK, so not all of them, but I OWN all of them)

    15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

    16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Doesn’t this go with the Lord of the Rings? Granted it is a separate story, but really…)

    17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

    18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger

    19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger

    20. Middlemarch - George Eliot

    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

    25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

    26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

    27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

    28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

    29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

    30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

    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 (See 33.)

    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

    41. Animal Farm - George Orwell

    42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown

    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 (This book still scares the crap out of me. Especially over the past eight years.)

    49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding

    50. Atonement - Ian McEwan

    51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel

    52. Dune - Frank Herbert (But then there is Son of Dune, and Extended Family of Dune and Dune the Part Written by the Extended Family of Frank Herbert and who cares)

    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

    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

    62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

    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’ Diary - Helen Fielding

    69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

    70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville

    71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens

    72. Dracula - Bram Stoker

    73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett

    74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

    75. Ulysses - James Joyce

    (I have actually started at least three times. And failed. I even tried getting a running start by re-reading “Portrait of the Artist…” and where is that on the list?)

    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

    84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro

    85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

    86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

    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

    90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

    91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

    92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (Oh, for the love of God, people. Why don’t you just put “Johnathan Livingston Seagull” on here, too?)

    93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

    94. Watership Down - Richard Adams

    95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole (I have to re-read this, because I LOATHED it, and so many people I respect and admire LOVE it. Clearly I missed something. Maybe)

    96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

    97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas

    98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Didn’t we already do the entire works back up there on line 14?)

    99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

    100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo



    I seem to be particularly lacking in modern New York Times best sellers, don’t I? And why is there such paucity of sci-fi and fantasy? And such a heap of Dickens and Austen? And does watching any number of film versions and remakes count? What more could there be to “Pride and Prejudice” that I haven’t seen? And I’ve even watch the Bollywood version. And why is there no way to mark the books you hated reading? I mean, I read “The Handmaid’s Tale” and I couldn’t say I enjoyed it, because it still gives me nightmares, but I wouldn’t say I hated it. On the other hand, having been forced in my high school AP English to slog my way through both “Moby Dick” and “Silas Marner” I could honestly say I read and loathed both. While I’m asking, where is “The Wizard of Oz”? And any works by Toni Morrison or Zora Neale Hurston?



    Anyway, if you chose to play, please leave me a comment, so we can all congratulate ourselves on how well read we are.



    Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/03 at 01:41 PM in Random Crap


    (7) Comments
    #1. Posted by gigi on December 03, 2008

    I’m one of those people who loved ‘A Confederacy of Dunces!’  And I’m glad to see that I’m not the only one who never read “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’; when I say this, people always look at me like I’ve been damaged in some way. (Maybe I should wait until it comes up in conversation).

    I am so doing this meme; I agree that it needs more fine tuning for hates and dislikes. Screw the intellectual elites at the Times ~ I’m putting frowny faces!

    How much will I get flamed if I put one next to the Bible, d’ya think?

    #2. Posted by RJ Flamingo on December 04, 2008

    Like you, I tried to read “Ulysses”. Several times. Never made it.  There should be something for “attempted”. And frankly, if I hate a book, I just stop reading it and move on.

    I might do this - I have to really look at the list and see if there are enough there that I’ve actually read to not make me look like a troglodyte. And I’ve read the Bible. As literature. The New Testament is actually pretty good reading, and actually a pretty good source of ammunition for self-defense.

    #3. Posted by JustJen on December 05, 2008

    http://jenclodius.com/

    ‘Nuff said.

    #4. Posted by Gigi on December 05, 2008

    I did it and congratulated myself, though I was so disappointed that “Silas Marner” was not on the list for me to frowny-face (why do they torture children with that book?) that I had to dispense with the proposed smiley system altogether.  :(

    #5. Posted by Paul on December 05, 2008

    I loved “Dunces” too. It mad me eat hot dogs like crazy, though.

    Does Shakepeare include all those sonnets? I wouldn’t wish that on…well, Karl Rove.

    #6. Posted by TNGEO on December 08, 2008

    Can’t believe Uncle Larry didn’t make the list…

    http://www.fcpub.com/archetype.php

    #7. Posted by Dianne on December 12, 2008

    confession time—I read Silas Marner in school and LOVED it.

    I’ve tried about four times to read Dune and I just can’t stand it. I have finally confessed that I will never read it. Just not going to happen.

    Commenting is not available in this channel entry.

    << Back to main