Friday 15 August 2008

Book Meme

Because we've been rather stressed and not doing much I thought I would do another meme. The lovely Caroline did this one and I thought I would give it a go

Look at the list of 'classics' and:

1) Bold those I've read.
2) Italicise those I intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books I love.
4) Pass it on to a few others.

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 - 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
[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
where is 44?
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 Magus - John Fowles
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 - Carols 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

So I've read 47 out of the top (allegedly) 100 classics. I've put the books I intend to read in Italics.....but I would like to know which one out of that list you would recommend I start with. (Feel free to recommend a book that you have loved that's not on the list.....I'm going to the UK soon and will be book shopping:-))

I'm not going to tag anyone specifically for this but if you fancy doing it then give it a whirl

15 comments:

Caroline said...

Yayay to your doing the meme.
I don't consider some of them to be classics!

We have liked many of the same books and so I'll look at the ones you've liked that I haven't read, then read them (!what a sentence!)

x

DJ Kirkby said...

Wow. We like so many of the same books! 'Lovely Bones' broke my heart lots, so sad, so well written.

Anonymous said...

ThI've got the Great Gatsby and Catch 22 so dont buy them - you can have them for the flight back.
Jo

Deborah Carr (Debs) said...

There are so many on the list that I haven't read. I too couldnt put down Lovely Bones and To Kill A Mockingbird arrived at my house yesterday.

Lane Mathias said...

OOh you've got to read Birdsong. I didn't think I would like it but I loved it! It's worth a whirl:-)

Carol said...

Caroline - I really enjoyed doing the Meme but was rather alarmed by the gaps in my reading!! I can definately see book buying in my future!!

I noticed that too :-) and was planning to have a closer look through your list and see which ones you had loved that I've not read!!

DJ - That is because we both have good taste...we read each others blogs so we must have :-)

I adored Lovely Bones....I thought it was a very clever way to tell a story and your right...completely heartbreaking!! (Am very much looking forward to reading Without Alice)

Jo - Cheers my dear!! At this rate I'm going to have to come over with an empty case so that I can bring back all the books I want to buy!!

Debs - I think To Kill A Mockingbird is one of my all time favourite books. I don't often re-read a book but this is one that I have and I loved it just as much the second time as I did the first!!

Lane - Thanks for the recomendation hon!! I will add that one to my list :-)

C x

Anonymous said...

A Tale of two cities It will make you cry.

Love Tomato

Carol said...

Thanks Tomato, I shall add that to my list of books to buy. (and shall not read it in public!!)

C x

peter_may said...

Hamlet is not a BOOK! It's a PLAY!

Carol said...

Hehehehe - Then I suggest that you track down the person that put this together and tell them that :-)

C x

Troy said...

Hello for the first time!
You should enjoy Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy if you like Potter and Narnia. Virtually everything by Thomas Hardy is very readable. I'm a real bookworm and can read just about anything but could not get into "Catch 22".

Carol said...

East Anglican Troy - Welcome and thanks for commenting :-)

I'm pretty certain that Chris has got Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy somewhere in the house. I shall have to see if I can track it down. Will keep a look out for Thomas Hardy stuff

C

Anonymous said...

Definitely LOVE IN TIMES OF CHOLERA - I am hispanic so I grew up with Marquez...And since you loved the Kite Runner then you have to read "A thousand splendid suns" same author and it was amazing as well...totally love it!

This is a great list I will copy it and read some of them.

Hirally

Carol said...

Hirally - Welcome and thanks for the recommendations. I've heard that Love In The Time of Cholera is fantastic before so will add that to my 'to be bought' list and the book club I am part of have just selected "A thousand splendid suns" as our next book so I'll be buying that one too.

I'll let you know how I get on :-)

C

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