That book list meme, which I thought I did but didn't

[petronia]

(Waiting for access to corporate CC so I can upgrade to SurveyMonkey Pro - LOL DEJA VU GUYS HUH, at least this time you won't have to answer it XD)

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here [actually, I remember the original article, and this is a misleading summary but whatever].

• Bold those books you've read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn't finish or read only an excerpt.

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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte [b, also everyone is dumb]
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 [e?, l]
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller [a]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier [c]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk [d]
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger [joliefolie: WHY IS THIS ON THE LIST????!!!!! ---LOLOL I concur, but I did read the whole thing]
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot [g?]
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell [b]
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald [f]
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky [f, g]
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck [part g, part h - it sounds like the kind of book I'd hate, but so does all of Steinbeck, and I enjoyed his other works anyway]
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy [f]
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen [h, i]
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen [h, i]
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini [j, I think I read a bad review]
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres [j]
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden [j]
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown [j, 5 pages were enough to come to that conclusion kthx]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [f]
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving [a, c]
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy [d, l]
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood [h]
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding [h]
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan [not quite b, e, or f, but some combination thereof]
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel [h]
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons [g]
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth [f, g]
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens [g, it’s the only Dickens I couldn’t make past the first chapter of – couldn’t tell what the book was about. Eventually I discovered I don’t really like Dickens]
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley [a, h]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon [a, h]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez [a, f]
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt [h]
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold [e]
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy [l]
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding [b]
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie [k]
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville [c]
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson [k]
75 Ulysses - James Joyce [j]
76 The Inferno - Dante [h]
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome [hahaha I barely remember a word of this ‘verse but I read all of dude’s books]
78 Germinal - Emile Zola [g, j - I really find nothing to like about Zola]
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray [a, h]
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens [I liked this so much as a kid it took me a long time to realize Dickens wasn't really a fantasy writer as it were]
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell [d]
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker [e]
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro [a, b]
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert [f]
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry [f, g]
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom [a - this appeared on some previous meme and I poked at it in the bookstore out of curiosity]
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton [k]
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks [h]
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams [h]
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole [a, j]
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute [d]
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (redundancy alert -- #14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Notes on books I didn’t read from start to finish:

[a] Started it in the bookstore or at someone else’s house, never got around to acquiring own copy
[b] Watched a movie adaptation, read some of the book for the pleasure of the thing, but saw no necessity in starting at the beginning and ending with the end seeing as one knew the plot already
[c] So long ago I honestly can't remember if I finished it or not
[d] Should I know what this is?
[e] Rape or child abuse in the first chapter (I am not squeamish, but it’s like shaking the hand of a stranger who says “I mean to be unpleasant to you today” instead of “nice to meet you”)
[f] Plot revolves around adultery and/or complicated “adult” romantic or familial relationships (boring and unrelatable in my teens, when I had a mind to go through The Classics; arguably still boring to me today)
[g] Plot involves social realism and the plight of oppressed classes in past centuries (more relevant to my interests, in order: romantic fiction about past centuries or far future, non-fiction that covers the same historical ground, realistic fiction set in present day)
[h] Stuff I always meant to read but never have, for some reason, and have been spoilered for by osmosis so there’s no hurry
[i] Books by dead authors I enjoy that I’m saving, because it’s not like they’re going to write more once I’ve read all of the ones out now
[j] Decided it was unnecessary to my life, based on skim or blurb
[k] Honestly I think I've just never come across a physical copy of this
[l] Who really reads Thomas Hardy? Really? For reals?

Comments

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

You probably read fable's scathing take-down of The Kite Runner. One of the best anti-reviews I have ever read XD.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

You should finish Catch 22 though. The book is told, not in chronological order, but in order of increasing absurdity and awfulness. The most emotionally moving stuff is at the end.

[petronia.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think I should at least go through this list and finish reading the ones I have no reason not to finish reading, other than out of sight out of mind. XD;