From Ceci n’est pas un blog. and via Ottermatic here’s a book meme about what you have read.
You bold what you’ve read, italicize what you’ve started but can’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. (And I guess italicize and strike through what you started and dropped because you couldn’t stand it?)
So here’s mine:
1984
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
Catch-22
The Catcher in the Rye
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver’s Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian : A Novel
The Hobbit
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi : A Novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
The Mists of Avalon
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
The OdysseyOliver Twist
On the Road
The Once and Future King
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake : A Novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : A Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse-five
The Sound and the Fury
The Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
Ulysses
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : An Inquiry Into Values
And to think I was so proud of the 39 books on that list that I’d read.
:P
Well, hell, I’ve only read 29 books on that list, but I’ve also read the complete works of William Shakespeare in the original English (Dad was stationed in England from 1953 to 1956, they bought it there when I was 3 or 4, and I read it in my early teens) and the complete works of Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe, plus more science fiction/fantasy than I can count. Not much on contemporary literature or best-sellers, I guess. And I won’t even list the Stephen King, Dean Koontz, or John Saul I’ve read.
What a great meme!
I found it interesting that you didn’t list the Lord of the Rings trilogy (but you’ve read The Hobbit). Was it an oversight or ???
I will leave you with a recommendation: Good Bones and Simple Murders by Margaret Atwood. Short stories (do they count?), and awesome!
Orodemniades:
LOL. I’ve always been a book worm. I compulsively read and compusively buy books. I’ve been going stir crazy the last two weeks because I’d already read my “new book” ration for the month and had read everything else in the house at least twice. I get paid on Thursday and am heading straight to the bookshop for a fix.
vesta44:
There is a lot that the list didn’t cover, definitely. But I liked going through the exercise, anyway.
lynnel:
Lord of the Rings wasn’t on the original list (unless I’ve developed a blind spot???), so that’s why it doesn’t appear above – but if it was it would be
couldn’t finish and hated. I really couldn’t deal with Tolkien’s narrative style (heresy, I know) and found the story far more palatable in the movie trilogy.And thanks, I love Margaret Atwood and love short story anthologies, too, so I will definitely check it out.
Ah ha! I’m sorry, I didn’t realize there was a master list. That makes much more sense now!
I know, it’s such a tiny list, isn’t it? When I went to the Harvard Classics site I was happy to discover that I’d read quite a few of them, but had missed many of the big ones. These days I make myself read one classic a year – on my to-do list is:
Ulysses
Tropic of Cancer
Anais Nin
Virginia Woolf
Cervantes…
In addition to everything else I read. I love genre, but alas my wallet isn’t up to reading the latest and greatest, and the local library can only do so much, y’know?
Ah well, so many books, so little time!
I don’t think not liking Tolkien is a heresy – a lot of people simply don’t gel with his style and can’t get through it, and many more object to his politics. I object to his politics but love his style too much to care. :P
I’m fairly lukewarm about Tolkein, but I found it odd that a “prequel” made the list and the “continuing saga” didn’t, particularly since so many of the other authors have multiple works represented.