Book Meme

[lukon_idein]

So, I find myself with a few free moments to check out my friends page over dinner and what to I find but raletha's evil book meme!!! Of course I had to do it. Just... couldn't... resist... AND it doesn't involve tagging anyone, so it doesn't make me feel all shy and uncomfortable. And of course I had to comment on lots of stuff along the way, cuz I'm mouthy like that.

SO, the deal is... "According to The Big Read, the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books on their list." And so us memers are supposed to...

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) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them.



1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (I adored the first three, but she started losing me after that.)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (Does the Lego Bible count?)
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (only partially bold, since I only read the 1st one – it really wasn’t all that nor a bag of chips)
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 (ALL of them? Nuh uh)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (The movie is a Must-See, by the way. Some of the best b&w cinematography you'll ever see, and Laurence Olivier is just soooooo hot. Oh, and the story is excellent, too.)
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (do audio books count?)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens (I was supposed to read it in college, but completely blew it off! Anything with the word ‘bleak’ in the title kind of gets pushed to the bottom of my pile.)
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 (This actually kicked serious ass)
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 (not since I was about 8, though...)
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (WHAT?? THIS is on here and NOT “I, Claudius”?? Guh.)
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 (HILARIOUS!)
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 (ditto on the audio books question – it was read by David Carradine – how could I resist??)
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville (A friend of mine read this well into her 30s simply because she never had, and assured me it was great; I’m thinking perhaps “Bartleby the Scrivener” was enough Melville for me!)
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (I have vague memories of reading this as a kid, but it could just have been a really good movie adaptation)
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 (I think I skipped most of this back in college too - though I do remember something about a violent mob tearing off someone’s penis and waving it about... um ick?)
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 - Kazuo Ishiguro (no, but I read his The Unconsoled which I adored – I may be in the minority there, though.)
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
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (read it in French for class, so my comprehension was probably not the best – I do remember something about lamplighters...)
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 (wait – why is he on here again after "The Complete Works"?? Doesn’t that pretty much cover EVERYTHING, including Hamlet??)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (a few chunks of it for French class but never the whole thing.).


SO. My total score: 28. Not bad, though I've seen more of AFI's top 100 movies, which I guess says something about how I spend my time. But of the books I haven't read, at least half I have chosen not read because I simply don't want to, so I don't feel too bad. Most of the others I'm not familiar with, so it will be fun to check those out and see what I am missing.

My obligatory complaints about the list:

* Too many sci-fi/fantasy series! 4? (Harry Potter, Narnia, Lord of the Rings and His Dark Materials??) Plus another slot for The Hobbit. Why so heavy in this one genre? What about Forester's Hornblower series, or O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin novels? There must be plenty of other good series out there that don't involve magic, elves or other worlds. (Not that I don't enjoy these series, but 4 slots? Out of all of world literature? How about China's Journey to the West then? That's got supernatural bits galore.

* Too much Dickens. 6?? Sure, the man was a great storyteller. But, again, 6 slots out of 100 for all of world lit??? I don't think so. Personally, I'd at the very least drop David Copperfield and A Christmas Carol, but that's just me. And Great Expectations is one of my favorite books of all time (NOT because of the fucked up relationship between Pip and Estella, but because he settles for being average and is okay with that - that ending made me cry for days when I reread it in my late twenties - high school kids have no business reading this book!) Or why don't we just call it 'The Complete Works of Dickens' and only use 1 slot? (Or 2, if you're Shakespeare, apparently.)

* Two words... Dan Brown.

* And what about Arthur?? Almost every woman I've ever met has read Mists of Avalon. What the hell?

My votes for books to take the 5 spots freed by consolidating Dickens:

1. Homer (Iliad/Odyssey combo pack is fine with me) - sure it's technically poetry, but come on.
2. Mists of Avalon by Marion Zimmer Bradley (I haven't even read it myself, but SOOO many people have recommended it to me, it really should be on there....)
3. Hornblower series by C.S. Forester (That's complete personal bias there, but it's a great series full of adventure and neurotic self doubt - it's a great lesson in how one's heroes are not perfect... And it doesn't end once his childhood ends; actually I think it starts when he's 17... I get a little sick of all the teen and preteen heroes dominating pop culture today. Everyone has to come of age, it's what they do afterward that really matters.)
4. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (for Raletha, and my Mom, also an English major)
5. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston (I know The Color Purple is already on there, but this book was just so.... perfect.)

Oh, and I also vote that we drop Captain Corelli's Mandolin in favor of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. The French, Spanish and Russians are represented, after all - where are the Italians? (Seems to be a lack of Germans too, not that I'm complaining, but I'd expect at least Thomas Mann to be there, or maybe Herman Hesse.)

Wow. Sorry for the rant(s) there! I guess I haven't been posting much lately and my brain felt the need to vent. If anyone has made it this far I salute you... and apologize! (And, Edrie, if YOU'VE made it this far, I know you'll have another 300 suggestions for amazing books I should read that I've never heard of...)

PS... as much as I love Austen, we should really just give her a 'Complete Works' slot, since I think only 2 of here novels weren't actually on the list. That frees up 3 more! Woohoo. Get your votes ready, people.

Comments

[misanagi.livejournal.com]

Narnia uses 2 slots too, the Chronicles and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Oh and Crime and Punishment rules. Raskolnikov stayed in my head for months after reading.

[lukon-idein.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah - look at that. TWO slots. Geez! What a waste!

Woohoo! I had to read C&P for a class and I remember thinking, 'oh hell, I've got to read one of those Great Russian Novels.' But then it was so suspenseful and fascinating that I couldn't put it down! Such a nice surprise. And the way you're stuck in R's head is just so intense. So glad to find another fan!!!

[lil-1337.livejournal.com]

I agree with most if not all of the rant. I loved Canterbury Tales even though most people I tell that to look at me strange. Chaucer is rude, crude and sly he only sound sophisticated because it's old english.

[lukon-idein.livejournal.com]

(I hope you at least agree with the too much Dickens! I mean really, people. SIX?)

It just seems to me sometimes that every new generation believes they've invented rebellion and naughty humor, so I like it when "classics" prove to be bawdy and crude. It shows kids that they aren't necessarily as innovative as they think, and that their ancestors weren't all naive prudes. I dunno. I could be way off base there. I'm a bit sheltered these days!

[raletha.livejournal.com]

Actually Chaucer wrote in Middle English. Think Beowulf for OE. That's English before the Norman conquest and its resulting infusion of French into English (which resulted in Middle English). They're pretty radically different. (Huh. And why isn't Beowulf on the list - at least in translation?)

/pedant

It's sad Chaucer is not on the list. I do regard him as the greatest and most influential writer of English in the canon. He wrote for the English court, which was just coming out from under Norman rule in the 14th century. French had been the language of the nobility for the past few hundred years, so when Chaucer, in his position at the court, wrote in English, it was a big deal. It brought the vernacular back into vogue. It also helped standardise the London dialect, which eventually evolved into the form of English spoken around the world now.

If you loved the Canterbury tales, I highly recommend Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. It's a Trojan War set tragic romance, essentially. What's remarkable is not just the beauty of Chaucer's verse (and it is a beautiful poem) but his care with characterisation, especially of Criseyde. She is, historically, a reviled character for betraying Troilus and Troy. Chaucer really fleshed her out, made her smart and sympathetic. It was such a novel treatment of not just Criseyde, but of any female character, it was a big risk for Chaucer to write her this way. Sadly, his characterisation didn't go over well at court. His later works show the fallout from this, including, actually, The Canterbury Tales.

And now I'll shut up with the lit geeking. I just get a little excited whenever I see folks use the word 'love' near anything by Chaucer. :D

[raletha.livejournal.com]

Definitely too much repetition with Dickens and Austen, and I don't get the repeat of Hamlet and TLTWATW when they are subsumed by other entries. Make room for Hermann Hesse (yes) and Chaucer (though I would pick Troilus and Criseyde over The Canterbury Tales as his great work, even if it is much less familiar to folks). More variety on this list would be good.

I, actually, would like to see more 'harder' science fiction on the list. ^^;; A Brave New World, Dune, and 1984 are a good start, but I think there are some other great writers in the genre, like Gibson, Dick, and (as Mis reminded me elsewhere) Asimov.

It does seem absurd not to include either The Illiad and/or The Odyssey. I don't know how the list was assembled.

Nice to see a post from you! <3 *hugs*

[lukon-idein.livejournal.com]

Oh right - there are other Chaucer choices. I do forget sometimes. :) I haven't read that one. (I'm waiting for the Hollywoodization of that story, now that Tristan & Isolde has been given the full treatment. *cringes in fear*)

Good point on the harder sci-fi. There are some important ideas from that quarter. What about Bradbury or Vonnegut? And why does Harry Potter need to be on the list? Just about everyone on the planet has read those already, so there's really no need to encourage people to read them. ;P

*hugs back* Thanks! Sorry I've such a slack lately. Seriously writers block is getting me down. :(

[raletha.livejournal.com]

Yes! OMG, Fahrenheit 451 should definitely be there! That is quite an oversight. I was bemoaning the lack of Vonnegut on the list elsewhere, too. I've been mainlining him this year. ^^ It's really warping my brain!

And yeah, Harry Potter, while enjoyable, doesn't seem to me to rise to the level of Great Literature. It's too young a work to know if it's going to last, but I don't feel like it has the thematic guts for a long run in the canon. (Did I mix too many metaphors just then?)

A movie of Troilus and Criseyde could be fun if they give it to the right screenwriter and director. Otherwise... yeah. Eep! And don't mind me, I am a big, stupid Chaucer fan (after having been blessed with an amazing professor for my ME classes). Srsly. I went to Poet's Corner in Westminster and bawled my eyes out over his marker there. I know most folks aren't familiar with much else he wrote, so I just like to air the title of my favourite when I see an opportunity. <3

I have not been writing much either. There seems to be an infectious, ether transmitted version of writer's block going about my flist. July 13th thejennabides is organising a little 12 hour (or possibly 24 hour) writeathon to help folks break out of their writerly blocks. Please join us if you're free!

[lukon-idein.livejournal.com]

There should be more Chaucer champions out there! I applaud your efforts. :) BTW, have you ever read a book called The Eyre Affair? It's set in an alternate universe where pop culture is obsessed with books rather than movies. I don't recall Chaucer being featured prominently, more Shakespeare, but it is really fun to read anyway - loaded with lit references and very funny.

Ooooh, I might be interested in a writeathon... not sure what my schedule is going to be like though. I'm going to be out of the country for all of July, and I'm not sure what my internet access will be like, but I might be able to at least take a day and write even if I'm not connected. Hmmmmm. I hadn't realized so many others were in the writing doldrums too! Must be related to global warming.