(no subject)
The BBC allegedly believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here:
How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (it made me too angry--I had to stop or I was going to burst an artery in my eye)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I keep getting bogged down in Leviticus)
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 (This one was just too darn depressing.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
18 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I got five pages in and then quit out of boredom)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (for school. My teacher then took us all down the street to a house that had been built in the '20s. It had a secret passage built into it for hiding liquor during parties)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I picked up the complete series omnibus paving stone for fifteen dollars shortly after Christmas. I am right now working my way through Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (This has been lying around the house lately. I'm thinking about it.)
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 (Um, what? Does someone at the BBC not know that this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia? Is it somehow because of that foul movie? *shakes fist at Walden Media)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I gave up when she was arranging for Dr. Crab to see her with someone else. I knew it was going to blow up in her face and I didn't want to be there to see it. I always hate those sorts of scenes. I still leave the room when the Beast throws Belle out of his inner sanctum.)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I'd never cried in sheer frustration from reading a book before)
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (This one, I honestly don't know. It's so ubiquitous that I don't know where I first started hearing about it. It feels like I've always known the story and I don't remember from where. A movie? The book? Osmosis?)
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 (This is the first book I remember trying to read. I couldn't make out even the smallest word, but I looked at the pictures and tried to figure out what was going on. Laughable results, naturally. This is the only time I remember specifically not being able to read.)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (No, THANK you. I already feel stupider for having seen most of the movie.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I came in in the middle, so had no idea what was going on and have quit until I can start at the beginning.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
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 (No clothes! Porthos!)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So, 20 for me, unless I counted wrong. I'm not unhappy that the number's low, really, because many of the books on that list are ones that I make a point of not reading (The Da Vinci Code, for example, or On the Road). There's a few on there that are on my list of Books I Have to Read, but not too many. Still, I was thinking that I really should start reading more again, and then I remembered that oh right, I have. I just haven't finished anything recently. Let's see, right now I'm reading Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, Expecting Adam, Anne of Windy Poplars, Stiffed, and am about 900 pages into Don Quixote, which I started reading over two years ago. So maybe I don't need to be quite so quick with the self-flagellation.
How do your reading habits stack up? [bold those books you've read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish]
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (it made me too angry--I had to stop or I was going to burst an artery in my eye)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I keep getting bogged down in Leviticus)
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 (This one was just too darn depressing.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
18 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I got five pages in and then quit out of boredom)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (for school. My teacher then took us all down the street to a house that had been built in the '20s. It had a secret passage built into it for hiding liquor during parties)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (I picked up the complete series omnibus paving stone for fifteen dollars shortly after Christmas. I am right now working my way through Young Zaphod Plays It Safe.)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (This has been lying around the house lately. I'm thinking about it.)
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 (Um, what? Does someone at the BBC not know that this is part of the Chronicles of Narnia? Is it somehow because of that foul movie? *shakes fist at Walden Media)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (I gave up when she was arranging for Dr. Crab to see her with someone else. I knew it was going to blow up in her face and I didn't want to be there to see it. I always hate those sorts of scenes. I still leave the room when the Beast throws Belle out of his inner sanctum.)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (I'd never cried in sheer frustration from reading a book before)
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens (This one, I honestly don't know. It's so ubiquitous that I don't know where I first started hearing about it. It feels like I've always known the story and I don't remember from where. A movie? The book? Osmosis?)
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 (This is the first book I remember trying to read. I couldn't make out even the smallest word, but I looked at the pictures and tried to figure out what was going on. Laughable results, naturally. This is the only time I remember specifically not being able to read.)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (No, THANK you. I already feel stupider for having seen most of the movie.)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (I came in in the middle, so had no idea what was going on and have quit until I can start at the beginning.)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
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 (No clothes! Porthos!)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
So, 20 for me, unless I counted wrong. I'm not unhappy that the number's low, really, because many of the books on that list are ones that I make a point of not reading (The Da Vinci Code, for example, or On the Road). There's a few on there that are on my list of Books I Have to Read, but not too many. Still, I was thinking that I really should start reading more again, and then I remembered that oh right, I have. I just haven't finished anything recently. Let's see, right now I'm reading Young Zaphod Plays It Safe, Expecting Adam, Anne of Windy Poplars, Stiffed, and am about 900 pages into Don Quixote, which I started reading over two years ago. So maybe I don't need to be quite so quick with the self-flagellation.