Monday, August 18, 2008

Reading List


Waiting for the ferry at Bellport Beach.......

This list came from Barbara of "Ramblings from an English Garden"
I'm going to add some notes.
The brackets on mine came up by mistake. I'm only dealing with READING.............
It seems pretty British in flavor but quite fun!
I have read 72 - and attempted a couple of the others and failed to get on with them. A very few I haven't even heard of.
Of course I haven't read every single word of Shakespeare or the Bible.
Maybe I'll give marks out of ten for each book.........then other people can tell me which other ones I should read......
These are the instructions if you want to put it on your blog.
COPY and PASTE

1. Bold those you have read

2. Italicize those you intend to read

3. [Bracket] those you have viewed via movie, TV or theatre



1 [Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen]10

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien

3 [Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte]10

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - only the first one

5 [To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee]10

6 The Bible 10

7 [Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte]9

8 [Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell]8

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman 2 couldn't get into it

10( Great Expectations - Charles Dickens)10

11 [Little Women - Louisa M Alcott] 8

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy 9

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Hell
er 6 Couldn't get into it

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare 10

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier 10

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien 2

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks 8

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger 10

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger 2

20 [Middlemarch - George Eliot] 10

21 [Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell) 8

22 [The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald] 10

23 [Bleak House - Charles Dickens] 9

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 10+

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams 7

26 [Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh] 10

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 9

28 [Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck] 10

29 (Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll) 9 - looking glass is better

30(The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame) 9

31 [Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy] 10

32 [David Copperfield - Charles Dickens] 9

33 [Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis] 9

34 [Emma - Jane Austen] 10

35 [Persuasion - Jane Austen] 10

36 [The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis] 10 - surely same as above?

37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - Thousand Splendid Suns even better 10

38 (Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres)

39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden

40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne 7

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell 7

42 (The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown ) 2
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 10+

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 9

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 7

46 [Anneof Green Gables - LM Montgomery]

47 [Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy]6

48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood 10

49 [Lord of the Flies - William Golding] 8

50 Atonement - Ian McEwan 7

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel

52( Dune - Frank Herbert) -walked out of movie!

53 [Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons) 10

54 [Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen] 9

55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - never heard of it........

57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 9

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley 8

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon 8

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez 9

61 [Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck] 9

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 10

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt 9

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 10

68 [Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding] 8 Fun. On same list as War and Peace?!!??

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie

70 [Moby Dick - Herman Melville]

71 [Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens] 9

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker

73 [The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett] 9 (too many adverbs)

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses - James Joyce - perfectly impossible for me to get through

76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath 10

77 ( Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome)

78 Germinal - Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 10+


81 [A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens] 9

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell

83 [The Color Purple - Alice Walker] 8

84 [The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro] 9

85 [Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert] 10+

86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

87 ( Charlotte’s Web - EB White) 9

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom WHAT!!?

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 10

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton 7

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 8

92 [The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery]

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks

94 (Watership Down - Richard Adams) 8

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole 5

96 (A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute) 7

97 [The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas]

98 [Hamlet - William Shakespeare] 10

99 [Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl] 10

100 (Les Miserables - Victor Hugo)

My grades are very random.
Why no Kurt Vonnegut? Katherine Mansfield, D.H.Lawrence?
This is fun..........

9 comments:

  1. I did this too but it took me about 700 years to do all the html tagging. BAH. But you MUST read A Suitable Boy. I was in a deep depression after I finished it - I wanted it to go on and on and on...

    Also loved A Secret History. And Captain Corelli's Mandolin.

    I will never read Harry Potter. I suppose that's really small minded of me, but I'm just so sick of it.

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  2. Hello Elizabeth, firstly the photo is awesome, what a great shadow photo :D

    My goodness, that is a very long list..I'll have problem listing 10% of yours.

    Happy week :D

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  3. Elizabeth, you hve even managed a striped sun shadow picture in The States too.

    Enjoyed reading your list. Out of the ones that you have not read you might like:
    Notes from a Small Island - hillarious. Bill Bryson's view of Englandwhen he first arrived.
    Swallows and Amazons. Takes one back to an idelaic childhood in the Lake District.
    A Suitable Boy. A picture of life in India
    Captain Coirrelli's Mandarin - too much to describe but has everything, a love story, a mediteranean island, the war. A brilliant read.
    Memoirs of a Geisha. I am just finishing it. At first I questioned it and found it very hard as oen gets so emotionally into the character but glad I stuck with it as it has a great picture of life in Japan in the 20's/30's.

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  4. Oh my Elizabeth, your reading list puts mine to shame. I saw this list about a month ago and decided to renew my commitment to read all the classics that I never have. I did enjoy The Time Traveler's Wife, Corelli's Mandolin, Memoirs of a Geisha and Harry Potter. I recently checked out Tess of the Turbervilles on CD and plan to listen to it on my upcoming trip to Florida.

    Thanks for visiting my blog today. Come back anytime.

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  5. oh....fun! I'll be doing this at some point...

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  6. Gosh! What a list! I'd probably agree with your ratings of the ones I've read on that list (I'm not as well-read as you btw!). I'd give Crime & Punishment a 10+ though. I'm currently reading The Kite Runner & loving it! I read On The Road when I was a teenager & thought it was great back then. I suspect I wouldn't feel the same about it if I read it now. Not sure why... & The Wasp Factory I have tried to read countless times but it's just not my thing. I finally gave up on that one. A friend had given me The Five People You Meet In Heaven, thinking I would like it. I read it. I have no idea why it's on that list. It's a best-seller & all...but...ick.

    You walked out of the film Dune? Yeah it was a shocker. Worst thing David Lynch has ever directed. I love every other film he has made :)

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  7. Hi from Marrakech where, as usual I am in my element! Hottish but nopt unbearable! Love Joan

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  8. Yes, I love your photo, too. Wonderful list of books, you have.

    Paz

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  9. I walked out of Dune too.....Have read quite a few of these, I am surprised to see. And even some you haven't! Though some I read in High School, so I'm not sure if I can give those full marks as I've forgotten most of the plot. I took a Bible as lit class in High School and made my way through some Shakespeare because my son's class was doing "As You Like It" and I was the prompter, so I'm pretty solid on that one.....

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I look forward to hearing from you!