All we like sheep, as my father regularly said about the roast leg of lamb

[flemmings]

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

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
-- all but the last. Because fool me seven times, more fool me

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

6 The Bible
-- *all* of it? No way. Most of it? Unlikely. Much of it? Yes. Bogged down amongst the Prophets and the Kings, basically.

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
-- stopped fifteen pages into one. Kimoi

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
--All? No way. Most? Probably. Can count on the fingers of one hand the ones I haven't read or (more importantly) seen. Henry VIII, I *am* looking at you. Otherwise my misspent 20s were misspent to some purpose, at Stratford ON.

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD 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
--to see what the fuss is about

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
--all but the essay at the end.

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

26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
--though Waugh was such a *pill*...

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
--err, why is this here after #33?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini

38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
--Not if you ripped my fingernails out

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
--some, not all. Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
--don't be ridiculous

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
--fingernails *and* toenails for this one

49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52 Dune - Frank Herbert
--to my eternal regret. That's three days gone from my life

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
--is it written in rhyming couplets? Then no.

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
--a thousand times no. The passage or two I looked at made me a little sick to my stomach. Anyway, I loathe Nabokov on principle, having read enough of him to be entitled to that privilege.

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
--if I ever read Kerouac it'll be The Dharma Bums

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding

69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
--I've read one Rushdie, OK? This means I'll never read another, OK? Nasty little man; almost as nasty as Philip Pullman

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
--all of it. Every blessed whaling chapter. Plus the batshit notes at the end of the Penguin edition, written by the narrator of Nabokov's Pale Fire

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
--yes, and I like it. Not enough to underline, but enough so's I might read it again.

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath

77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
-- no, but I read one or two in the series

78 Germinal - Emile Zola
--to my shame, have read no Zola at all

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray

80 Possession - AS Byatt
--I have it, I've started it, it does not, shall we say, grab the attention and never let go. Nasty little woman.

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
--possibly even all of them, one way or another. But since I started reading him over 40 years ago, I don't remember what all I've read

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
--for school. Otherwise blech.

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
--probably. I've managed to blot it from my mind

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
--I coud be snotty and say life is too short to read white American males who feel sorry for themselves. In fact, generally I find life too short to read white American males. White British males are another proposition entirely, especially if they *don't* feel sorry for themselves while having every reason to do so. Back to Going Postal once I've finished this.

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
--I love the idea of it, but I know better than to ever reread it. Naze nara, I am not 13 any more.

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
--you mentioned him already. Still, a work that exists in one's hindbrain and influences everything from there. Some works are larger than life and larger than literature, and Hamlet is one, and I still have no idea why. Must be the language.

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Comments

[nekonexus.livejournal.com]

oh hey. Someone else who has actually read ALL of Moby Dick and Les Mis. ^_^ cool!

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

TBH I think my edition of Les Mis may have been abridged. It was doorstopper size and a hardcover, but it was an edition for children. My experience is, if a 19th century French author weighs in at under 700 pages, something's been cut.

OTOH that series' edition of The Old Curiosity Shop wasn't cut, so maybe I *have* read the whole thing. Rather an awful thought, on the whole.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

Heh, so many of your comments I can agree with.
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
-- stopped fifteen pages into one. Kimoi
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
--don't be ridiculous
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
--is it written in rhyming couplets? Then no.
XD
AGREEMENT!
And of course, #95 I agree wholeheartedly.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Seth does have a novel in rhyming couplets that I keep meaning to track down. He's a dab hand with a couplet, as his translations prove.

[tekalynn.livejournal.com]

Probably The Golden Gate, but that's a series of sonnets rather than rhymed couplets per se. Inexplicably in thirteen rather than fourteen chapters, and yes, the chapter titles form their own sonnet.

[tammylee.livejournal.com]

I can handle maybe a page of rhyming couplets but then they produce this sour taste in my mouth. Studying Canterbury tales was hell!

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Did you stdy it in middle English? Because ME goes down a fair treat. Modernized sucks.

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

*fascinated* Just what is that thing in your icon? Some sort of pig?

I found the first half of Brideshead Revisited amusing enough, but after a while... blech.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

How did you miss the last episode (http://radiofreebanri.livejournal.com/22501.html) of Radio Free Banri? It's the pig-bear Nataku that spoiler spoiler spoiler.

[rasetsunyo.livejournal.com]

Ohhhhh! I didn't! I just didn't make the link.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I aspire to your well-read-ness! (And, oh yeah, maybe I could spare a little time between reading about adolescents with problems and power fantasies to read books that people my age are likely to care about. No, not my age - that's hipster novels about hipster Brooklynites.)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

YA is more consistently entertaining than a lot of what's up there, frankly. And even when it's not, it's shorter. I don't know that one gains huge amounts from having waded through War and Peace if you don't find loooong novels satisfying in themselves. (Dostoevsky's the man if you want to do Russian, and preferably something other than Crime and Punishment.)

[kickinpants.livejournal.com]

You didn't read the last HP? It's better than the 5th, I'll say, even with the boring camping part. Not great though.

Watership Down- great book, but maybe I'm biased since I read it at 12 and never stopped loving it, and reread it later and still loved it.

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

Nothing could have been worse than OotP. But Rowling is just not that intelligent a writer, and her thin characterization finally got to me. Everything I heard afterwards about DH confirmed the 'messy' feel I got from her, and the coda confirmed it.

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

I keep meaning to read both His Dark Materials and the Narnia chronicles to see what all the religious to-do is about for comparison, but never got past first few chapters of the first book in both.

(There are too many books on this list which I read as compulsory texts/after watching the audio-visual adaptation. Some I did just for masochistic purposes >_<)

[flemmings.livejournal.com]

The first Narnia meaning Lion or The Magician's Nephew? I find TLtW&tW the thinnest of them all. Like kickinpants with Watership Down, it's something I read as a child and probably can't judge properly any more. But I find Lewis' prose still eminently readable, even when I disagree with him violently, which I can't say of Pullman's.

Only three of them were compulsory for me, and two of those- Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice-- are favourites. But most were semi-compulsory, in that all my uni friends were in English and one had to read the warhorses to be able to talk to them. Hence Middlemarch. And Felix Holt, Radical, if we come to that.

[feliciter.livejournal.com]

TLtW&tW, which I picked up rather late in the day, in the wake of the ecclesiastical fuss about Pullman and comparisons to Narnia.

Pride and Prejudice is the only book that I have been able to re-read after the compulsory analysis-to-bits of high-school literature.