They say that a person's bookshelf can tell a lot about them. I'm kind of curious to know what mine would say. Because I do have, and read often classics like Jane Eyre, and they sit next to some scifi/fantasy that most people I know haven't even heard of. And that's sat right next to a whole load of pop-sci books. Not quite enough to rival my father's collection yet, but give it time.
In a way. I can actually blame this on my genes. On both Nature and Nurture. My father is a big big reader, and his siblings, the only ones I see of a regularity, also love to read. It became understood that when we went to see my uncle, we would raid his bookcase. Now he doesn't have wallpaper in his bedroom. He has bookcases. And books. Lots and lots of books.
All of this has combined to the point that I am a BIG reader, and by big, I mean that, in certain portions of my life, people literally never saw me without a book in my hands. Recently, I have become a fairly big facebooker as well, and I found this whilst browsing (or facebook stalking and certain of my friends call it). So, curious, I pulled it off and followed most of the instructions. All bar step six, in fact.
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '#' to the ones you didn't like.
4) Star '*' those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (I keep trying. I'm two thirds of the way through now. It's not that I don't like it, but I keep getting distracted)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy* (sitting on my shelf, looking at me disapprovingly)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x+ (clever. very clever)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier * (possibly one of the most famous first lines ever... now to read the rest)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x+
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 x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x+
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I think I started this. then got distracted. by that annoying work thing.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Apparantly better than the film, but the film put me off. The French Leftenent's Woman, however, is a cracking read.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
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 Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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
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 (ish. I had to give it back to the library half way through)
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 x+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
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 x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
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 x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn x
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-Eupery
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 x+++(if I had a favourite, this would be a hot contender)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've heard the song summery by Martin Carthy, does that count? Oor Hamlet, if you want to find it)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Meant to have read 6 out of these? Is the fact that I have read more like 35 a sign of a misspent youth? Now a few years ago, the BBC did something called The Big Read. I followed this with interest, and now have a copy of that list on my board, because I am determined to read through it. That list is different from this list, although a lot of the titles are the same. Which is why, in part, I have actually read so many on this list. For example, A Town Like Alice which is one of my ALL time favourite reads, (I must find that copy, I know it is hanging around somewhere) I only read because it was on the list and it was the first one I found in my father's bookcase.
I don't know if I will ever finish these lists.I can hope, but equally, I also hope I won't, or at least that they get added to by a new big read list. Because that means that there will always be books out there to read. Not that there wouldn't be, but, the lists make it more realizable somehow.
I think I have run out of steam just about. So I'll go back to my book. Not one on the list, but a wonderful take of the beauty and the beast fairytail. The Fire Rose it is called. By Mercedes Lackey. Try it. Consider it the start of my list for you. Whoever you may be. Enjoy.
In a way. I can actually blame this on my genes. On both Nature and Nurture. My father is a big big reader, and his siblings, the only ones I see of a regularity, also love to read. It became understood that when we went to see my uncle, we would raid his bookcase. Now he doesn't have wallpaper in his bedroom. He has bookcases. And books. Lots and lots of books.
All of this has combined to the point that I am a BIG reader, and by big, I mean that, in certain portions of my life, people literally never saw me without a book in my hands. Recently, I have become a fairly big facebooker as well, and I found this whilst browsing (or facebook stalking and certain of my friends call it). So, curious, I pulled it off and followed most of the instructions. All bar step six, in fact.
Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '#' to the ones you didn't like.
4) Star '*' those you plan on reading.
5) Tally your total at the bottom.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x+
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x+
10 Great Epectations - Charles Dickens (I keep trying. I'm two thirds of the way through now. It's not that I don't like it, but I keep getting distracted)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy* (sitting on my shelf, looking at me disapprovingly)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x+ (clever. very clever)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier * (possibly one of the most famous first lines ever... now to read the rest)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
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
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x+
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 x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x+
34 Emma - Jane Austen x
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I think I started this. then got distracted. by that annoying work thing.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Apparantly better than the film, but the film put me off. The French Leftenent's Woman, however, is a cracking read.)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x+
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
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 Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy*
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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
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 (ish. I had to give it back to the library half way through)
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 x+
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson x
75 Ulysses - James Joyce x
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x
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 x
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker x
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 x
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Alborn x
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-Eupery
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 x+++(if I had a favourite, this would be a hot contender)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (I've heard the song summery by Martin Carthy, does that count? Oor Hamlet, if you want to find it)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Meant to have read 6 out of these? Is the fact that I have read more like 35 a sign of a misspent youth? Now a few years ago, the BBC did something called The Big Read. I followed this with interest, and now have a copy of that list on my board, because I am determined to read through it. That list is different from this list, although a lot of the titles are the same. Which is why, in part, I have actually read so many on this list. For example, A Town Like Alice which is one of my ALL time favourite reads, (I must find that copy, I know it is hanging around somewhere) I only read because it was on the list and it was the first one I found in my father's bookcase.
I don't know if I will ever finish these lists.I can hope, but equally, I also hope I won't, or at least that they get added to by a new big read list. Because that means that there will always be books out there to read. Not that there wouldn't be, but, the lists make it more realizable somehow.
I think I have run out of steam just about. So I'll go back to my book. Not one on the list, but a wonderful take of the beauty and the beast fairytail. The Fire Rose it is called. By Mercedes Lackey. Try it. Consider it the start of my list for you. Whoever you may be. Enjoy.
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