Updated Reading List Meme

[velvetpage]

A friend of a friend by the handle of lebo_superman updated the meme that's been making the rounds regularly the last few years, to take out some of the inconsistencies and reorganize it a bit. Here's mine, with some commentary.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
3 Jayne Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
5 Harry Potter (any - 1pt each) - JK Rowling So that's seven points, because I've read them all.
6 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7 The Bible
8 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien  I know, I know.  Apparently I quit about ten pages before the pace picked up, and I've never gone back to it.
9 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
10 The Two Towers - JRR Tolkien
11 Return Of The King - JRR Tolkien
12 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
13 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
14 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
16 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
17 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
18 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
19 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
20 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
21 You Can Heal Your Life - Louise L. Hay
22 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
23 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
24 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
25 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
26 Middlemarch - George Eliot
27 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
28 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
29 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
30 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
31 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
32 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
33 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
34 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
35 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
36 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (1 point each)
37 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis  So, seven points there, too.  Do I get bonus points for reading them multiple times?
38 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
39 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
40 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 1984 - George Orwell  Yes, I skipped this.  I got the Coles Notes version from being married to Piet.
43 Brave new World - Aldous Huxley
44 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
45 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
46 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
47 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
48 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
49 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
50 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
51 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
52 Atonement - Ian McEwan
53 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
54 Dune - Frank Herbert
55 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
56 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
57 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
58 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
59 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
60 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
61 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
62 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
63 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
64 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
65 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
66 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
67 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
68 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
69 Dracula - Bram Stoker
70 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
71 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
72 Ulysses - James Joyce
73 The Inferno – Dante
74 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
75 Germinal - Emile Zola
76 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
77 Possession - AS Byatt
78 Common Sense for the 21st Century - Myrddin McGill
79 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
80 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
81 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
82 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert  In French, no less.
83 Five Wishes - Gay Hendricks
84 Learning To Love Yourself - Gay Hendricks
85 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
86 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
87 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
88 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad  I think I read this.  It was in the library in my town in France, French on one side of the page, English on the facing page.  I was desperate enough for reading material that I read it all the way through.  In fact I think I read it in both languages.
89 Courageous Souls - Robert Schwartz
90 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
91 Watership Down - Richard Adams
92 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
93 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
94 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas  Again, in French.
95 The Power of Now - Eckhart Tolle
96 The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire - Deepak Chopra
97 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo  I've read the whole thing in English and parts of it in French.
98 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
99 Illusions - Richard Bach
100 The Essene Gospel of Peace - Edmond Bordeaux Szekely

So, thirty-nine.  There are some I still intend to read but have never gotten around to it, like Dune and Watership Down.  And there are a bunch of books that ought to be on this list, like A Wrinkle in Time, that I've read and loved.

I should take some time sometime soon to write about some of the books I bought my students for literature circles this year.  I'm bringing myself up-to-date on current YA literature, and there's some really good stuff being written. 

Comments

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Lists like this are fun, but I dislike them because really, who wrote them? There's no credit listing that it's the top selling works of all time, or the books most commonly used in school, anything. As you say, there are tons missing that I've read that would be considered classics by nearly anyone (Faust, Madame Bovary, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Huckleberry Finn, etc.). While we're at it, who says that Charles Dickens deserves SIX spots in a list of 100 while Mark Twain gets zero? I don't get it. And, I'm secure enough in my education to admit there are a good handful of books there I've never even heard of. I say some dude (or dudette) who happens to like those books wrote a list of 100 favorites they think everyone should read and then if we haven't read them, we're somehow not educated. Maybe I should write my own list. :)

Sorry for the rant. :)

[melstra.livejournal.com]

Oops, forgot as I rescanned that Madame Bovary IS on the list (I've read it in French too), but not Candide, for example, or Le Petit Prince.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Le Petit Prince was on the earlier version of the list, I think removed by the editor who rewrote it. I've read it in both English and French. But there are a bunch of French authors that aren't represented at all.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Not to mention the overall anglo-centrism of the list. Anyone who studied comp lit instead of literature will be mostly left out by this list, though they might be very well-read in the languages they compared with. Other than a couple of French novels that are embedded in English culture via popular media, and a couple of Tolstoy books, it's entirely lit that was first written in English. Oh, and Dante's Inferno.

[summerfields.livejournal.com]

What do the italicized ones mean?

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Italicized means you read part of it. I should have italicized Lord of the Rings, actually.