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

BookCrossing - I am a member and it's brilliant!!

BookCrossing -
n. the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.
(added to the Oxford English Dictionary in August 2004)

This is the second book group that I am a part of and the lovely thing about it is that you can join anywhere in the world at the moment there are 544,219 members and 3,803,703 books registered. It's really easy to be a part of -

1. You read a good book

2. You go to bookcrossing.com and register it (along with your thoughts on the book - this is known as a journal entry), You will be given a unique BCID (BookCrossing ID number) which allows the book's movement to be tracked. You must then mark the book with the BCID and the BookCrossing web address so that the finder is able to make a journal entry for the book and enter his/her location on the website.

3. You then Release it for someone else to read (give it to a friend, leave it on a park bench, donate it to charity, "forget" it in a coffee shop, etc. - If you leave it in a public place this is known as leaving a book 'In the Wild'), and then you will get notified by email each time someone goes to bookcrossing.com and records a journal entry for that book. (Before 'releasing' a book it must be registered on the website)

Told you it was easy!!

If you find a book (or are given one) that has been registered on the website it is known as Catching. To "catch" a book, the BCID marked on the book must be entered at BookCrossing.com and the person is able to enter their location and make a journal entry about where they found the book and what they thought of it. Then you are encouraged to 're-release' the book so that the process can be continued and other people are able to enjoy the book.

Oh and you can also make Release Notes on a book - This is in addition to your journal entry and you do this when you are leaving it somewhere for a stranger to find. Your book will then appear on the Go Hunting section and other people can 'Go Hunting' and try to find it.

BookCrossing has been criticized by a few authors (There are more authors who are actually members) who claimed that books were being devalued by the website as BookCrossing could lead to lower sales of books and, therefore, the reduction in royalties being paid to authors. I dispute this argument - I think that the website introduces readers to authors and genres that they have not read before (I've gone out and bought other books by an author that I have come across on BookCrossing), that the website gets more people to take up or reclaim reading as a hobby, and that some members, having read a book that they have enjoyed, will buy extra copies to distribute through BookCrossing. (I know quite a few people who have done this - they couldn't stand to part with the book because they loved it so much but still wanted to share it!!)

I think it's brilliant!!