Thursday, July 17, 2008

Well Read?



Nick Daws, who runs my favourite writers forum, My Writers Circle recently posted on the forum asking members to come forward to be tagged on a meme (a kind of chain blog from what I understand) regarding what bloggers have and have not read. The list came originally from the US Big Reads Survey, the results of which are as expected, somewhat different to the UK equivalent. This is to be expected since they are different markets and Americans do have different tastes. It also helps to explain why so many US titles are listed, which were not necessarily as successful here. The list though seems to be sweeping rapidly through cyber space. I am not sure who to tag myself to pass it on, since most of my writing friends do not have blogs, so I hope the meme does not stop with me.

Here is what you are supposed to do:

1) Bold the titles you have read
2) Italicise those you intend to read
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog

Here then is my version:

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
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
15) Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16) The Hobbit - JR 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
23) Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24) War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25) The Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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)
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
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
49) Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50) Atonement - Ian McEwan
51) MISSING
52) Dune - Frank Herbert
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's 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
76) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80) Possession - A. S. 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
93) The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94) Watership Down - Richard Adams
95) A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96) A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97) The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98) Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I make this a rather sad 16, which is a bit pathetic really. I am almost ashamed to say that I have seen more of these books as films, than read the books themselves. I am though a non fiction writer, so most of my reading in the last few years at least, has been non fiction, mostly alternative history and the like. I included The Bible in my list, since although I have not read the whole lot, I have read large chunks of it. I had to for my own book, although it is interesting in its right. Not enough to be included in the 'love it' category though.

2 comments:

Nick said...

Interested to see you have read Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruis Zafon, June. I read this book earlier this year, but I freely admit I found it a struggle. It's well written, but for me too much of it consisted of people talking about things that happened in the past. I'd be intrigued to know what you thought of it.

Nick - Mywritingblog.com

June said...

Hi Nick, and thanks for stopping by! I must admit that I did find that book hard going at times, and it wasn't until I got past the first couple of chapters that I really started to get into the story. Once it got going though, it found it a brilliant read, full of suspense. I think it was the book theme that appealed to me, the fact that it was about this young boys quest to find out more about the author of this strange book.