SUMMER INTERLUDE
Thanks to Louise for asking me to pursue this blog “meme” - there seem to be one or perhaps two semi arbitrary lists of books floating around the blogs, the idea is to say how many you have read. But the real point is to provide an opportunity to chat about what you think are good books and which aren’t.
This is what we were asked to do:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read 6 and force books upon them
So these are my answers.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The 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 Mitchell22 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
;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
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collin
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 Mitchell84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
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
To start the literary ball rolling….
Moby Dick and Woman in White…excellent.
Though I have to say I was not impressed by Birdsong by Faulks (meant to say that before..).
And there aren’t many women writers in all the lists going around the blogosphere…or poetry.
Also, I was still tempted to half-bold books that I had half read (’fraid i have a short attention span).
Comment by Louise — 8 August, 2008 @ 6:08 pm
Was this list compiled by the John Motson of English literature? If so how come he let Iain Banks slip through the filtering process?
When I see lists like this it just confirms how culturally myopic and inward-looking a sizeable section of the English chattering classes are.
Comment by Kevin Williamson — 8 August, 2008 @ 7:14 pm
Wow, no half measures there, you’ve either read a book or have no intention of ever doing so!
The list does appear to be overwhelmingly British and American, and there are some curious choices - I would say for Conrad the Secret Agent was superior to the Heart of Darkness, but then what do I know, I’m certainly not as well read in fiction as mein host.
Comment by Jim — 8 August, 2008 @ 8:29 pm
Jim,
don’t read much fiction nowadays, but read a lot when I was younger, so it is true that i have little interntion of reading these novels.
It is a poor list: no Paul Auster, No Cormac McCarthy, no Richard Ford, no Faulkner, not even Gore Vidal. American novelists are actually under-represented.
But then Kevin’s point is also wrong, becasue there are serious english novelists missing as well: no Graham Greene, no George orwell, no William Boyd, not even Kipling.
No German’s at all!
What it suggests to me is that the list is weighted toward nineteenth century novels or children’s fiction.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 August, 2008 @ 9:47 pm
Louise, I think 9 out of the top 20 are woman, but you are certainly correct that over the whole 100, they are mainly men.
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 August, 2008 @ 9:48 pm
Andy: “It is a poor list: no Paul Auster, No Cormac McCarthy, no Richard Ford, no Faulkner, not even Gore Vidal. American novelists are actually under-represented.”
Tis true….. No Paul Auster
“But then Kevin’s point is also wrong, becasue there are serious english novelists missing as well: no Graham Greene, no George orwell, no William Boyd, not even Kipling.”
Er, Andy, George Orwell is at no. 8 and no. 41
Comment by Louise — 8 August, 2008 @ 9:53 pm
oh OK - I am wrong! But still no Graham Greene.
And in terms of being biased against Scots, aren’t JK Rowling and Arthur Conan Doyle Scottish?
Comment by Andy Newman — 8 August, 2008 @ 9:56 pm
Yeah, but like most of the list the women in the top 20 are the usual suspects of literature (with the exception of Niffenegger and Rowling).
Comment by Louise — 8 August, 2008 @ 10:00 pm
“oh OK - I am wrong! But still no Graham Greene”
Sorry Andy, no offence, just pointing out that Orwell was there. Indeed Greene isn’t
there and probably should be (and meant to say that in previous comment).
JK Rowling is from Yate, Gloucestershire though Conan Doyle was from Edinburgh….
Comment by Louise — 8 August, 2008 @ 10:05 pm
Should be though Andy, why ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ isn’t on the list when ‘The Da Vinci Code’ is does discredit it somewhat. I’m not a big fiction fan myself, but I think you should give ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’ a go. Right about Shakespeare though, a timewaster and Tudor propagandist, wouldn’t give him the time of day.
Comment by Jim — 8 August, 2008 @ 10:06 pm
Is an excellent bk ‘All Quiet on the Western Front” (along with the film).
Comment by Louise — 8 August, 2008 @ 10:12 pm
I wonder why the novels of James Hogg, Robert Louis Stevenson, George Douglas Brown, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Muriel Spark, Neil Gunn, Ian Crichton Smith, Alexander Trocchi, Niaomi Mitchison, Robin Jenkins, William McIlvaney, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, Irvine Welsh, James Robertson, Jeff Torrington, Matthew Fitt, Alan Warner, Ali Smith, and AL Kennedy are off-radar in the south of England when these listy things are initiated?
Remnds me off when Sky had a greatest football manager of all time viewers poll and Jock Stein didnt make the top 20 but Kevin Keegan did.
No disrespect to Ian McEwan, Louis De Bernieres, Frank Herbert, Dan Brown, Kenneth Graham, Douglas Adams and Richard Adams - all of whose books on that list I’ve read - but none of their works are fit to the lace the boots of any of the novels of above Scottish writers.
I’m only surprised that the authors of Biggles, Just William, Billy Bunter, Little Black Sambo and Jungle Book were omitted from the original list.
Comment by Kevin Williamson — 8 August, 2008 @ 10:45 pm