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Friday, December 03, 2010

A lot more than 100 books

*


It's been AGES since I've done a meme; I know I've done this one before, but I think the list has been updated. While I'm sitting here trying to decide if I feel well enough to hang around outside in the rainy damp in order to present my residency tonight or if I should sit in the relatively germy closeness of a cinema with my boys, or whether I should just go back to bed (I'm REALLY bored with that option), I might as well reminisce about the nice books I've read and see which gaps I need to plug this close to Christmas.

I got this version from Godard's Letterboxes:

And so it comes around again….

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:

Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.

Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2. Lord of the Rings – JR 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 (but I have it on my iPhone, waiting for a chance)

24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25. The Hitch Hiker’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 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 (Oh, I'm so ashamed)

43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – 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


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 – Carlos 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 – AS Byatt

81. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens


82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell

83. The Color Purple – Alice Walker

84. The Remains of the Day – Kazu 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 (Am tackling these on ebook right now)

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


Phew, that's a lot more than 6! There are 15 that I've never tackled, which gives me a score of 85. Mind you, with all the sets, there's a lot more than 100 books on that list. Lucky I had my Thomas Hardy binge this year! How did you go?

Nice gaps, though. Gives me something to look for at the library for our Christmas sojourn to the Blue Mountains... we're renting a house around the corner from the in-laws, so that we can do the Big Family Christmas but still have some space. Board games and books ho! Last time we had Xmas at the BMs, it snowed! Mmm, that would be nice, although my Dr Sista Outlaw (happy birthday for yesterday!) might not agree.


* This image is a sculpture idea I have. It's called 'Book Club'. One day I'll make it.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's a vague sort of list, don't you think? If you look at all the stories contained within things like the bible, Shakespeare and other "sets."
Does it count if I read them and found them so dreary I forget what they're about? There are a few of those!
But I'm somewhere around the 80 mark.

Avoid cinemas.

Ampersand Duck said...

It IS a weird list, isn't it?
No, I've forgotten a lot of them too. In fact, I had to go in & change my numbers because when I re-read the post I suddenly realised that I'd read another one.

I would love to avoid cinemas but I'm CRAVING low lights and Dolby sound. I think the movie is winning. Better than damp coughing.

You must be leaving soon, for cat-sitting? So jealous. You will have a lovely time.

ronnie said...

I am smiling at 'book club'....it's like a miniature version of my big boys 'ex libris'
(http://rhondaayliffe.blogspot.com/2009/04/lake-light-sculpture-and-me.html) and 'excubitor' - (http://rhondaayliffe.blogspot.com/2010/03/sculpture-on-edge.html)

....or maybe its their love child?

snort!

(ps I know that I've read more than 6 but less than 85 of the list....... but like amanda - there's many that I've either blocked out due to extreme boredom or forgotten, due to old age!)

Cozalcoatl said...

I have only read 40, 8 of them were in the first 10 ...a few I started and never finished.

I need to stop re-reading my favourites and branch out ;)

Carol said...

78 for me and a few italicised ones like the Bible and Ulysses that I've never managed (or needed) to finish. I do re-read my favourites over and over and I have to admit that some of those are kids' books that I really love.

Your Book Club is great - love the spike.

Anonymous said...

That is a pretty awesome effort there. I think I definitely have a few to read before I attempt this list again!

Mummy/Crit said...

Man alive, that's quite a list that you've read there Duck. I'm nowhere near that (39?), but like you I have 'binges' on authors. Had a Hardy one, and a Dickens one, but have never read _any_ Austen or Brontes. I can say that of your 15 that you've never read I've read 4. I'm lacking in that 'modern classic' genre

Ampersand Duck said...

I guess it helps that I've done two English degrees, with lots of reading lists! And that I was a travelling child whose only constant friends were books :)

Sue said...

I think (my memory is shot)I have managed 74 or so, plus a few I have dabbled in. And there are so many more. Reading becomes an addiction, but I have to confess that I reread constantly. I usually have two or three books on the go, at least one of which I have read before. And the list reminded me of some more to reread. Thanks

francine said...

I like your book club. Its name made me smile.
I will need a few reading retreats to catch up on those lists though. What a nice idea, a reading retreat!