#985: 20 out of 100 ain't bad?

So this is Post Number 985 for this particular blog, since its start in October 2004... How should I mark #1000? Suggestions welcome!! :)

On another note: Saw this at i hate kit kats a while ago, and decided to try it out. Yes another meme, and another book-related one at that. So sue me! :D

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The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy the list, and put an 'x' after those you have read, count 'em up, compare tallies. This should be easy. Strutting and preening is optional.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen ( )
2. The Lord of the Rings ( ) (I tried - twice!)
   
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte ( )
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (X) (multiple times, only #7 once so far)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ( )
6. The Bible - ( )
7. Wuthering Heights ( )
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (X)
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ( )
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (X) (Does the abridged version in school count?)
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 Faulk ( )
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger ( )
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (X)
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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (X) (twice)
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh ( )
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky ( )
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck ( )
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
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 ( ) [and this is separate from #33 why?]
    
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini ( )
38. Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres ( )
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden ( )
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne ( )
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell (X)
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 (X)
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (X)
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 (X) (Again - does the abridged version count?)
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley ( )
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (X)
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 (X)
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 ( ) (Couldn't get past the second page!)
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville ( )
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X) (Abridged!! Do you see a pattern here?)
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker (X) (Children's Illustrated version count?)
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett ( )
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson ( )
75. Ulysses - James Joyce ( )
76. The Inferno – Dante ( )
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome ( )
78. Germinal - Emile Zola ( )
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray ( )
80. Possession - AS Byat ( )
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 (X) (I do NOT recommend this insipid read!)
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (X)
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X)
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X)
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks ( )
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams (X)
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole ( )
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute ( )
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas (X)
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare ( ) [and this is separate from #14 why?]
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (X)
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (X)
     

So that's 20 for me. How about you?

I have to point out that this list is pretty random - I doubt its origins "from the BBC", and the sloppy entries (Shakespeare and CS Lewis) turn this into a joke.

However, it's amusing for me to look at this list and have absolutely NO desire to even touch many of the works listed. You see, I have this aversion to "classic" "literature": it's a reflexive instinctual reaction developed from childhood, from school, where if you were "good in English" then it was assumed you liked/read classics by Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, etc. I very much preferred fantasy, regular fiction and Stephen King; had no patience for the stuffy classics; and knew I was judged lacking by certain peers and teachers. Me being me, I put on my stone face and thick skin and did my own thing.

Of the 20 I have read above, I think I would recommend The Time-Traveler's Wife: it is an excellent read, just make sure you have a box of tissues with you, especially when nearing the end of the book!

Of the remaining 80 above, Possession by A S Byatt has been on my to-read list for about a year. I first heard about her when taking my Fairy Tales class: she has a short story collection of modern / re-written / new fairy tales that were well-written. She comes across as a very articulate writer, and while I'm not a fan of love stories per se, I am very interested in the description of what this book is about. I also have the movie version somewhere on my Netflix queue - we'll see which I get to first! :)

As usual, feel free to tag yourself! Do drop me a comment with a link to your post if you try this out on your own site, k? I'd love to see your own comments to the list.

Cheers!

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