scarfle: (one hundred minus one days)
It is truly useful since it is beautiful. ([personal profile] scarfle) wrote2012-01-09 07:25 pm

woke up in london yesterday;

Bold the ones you've read COMPLETELY, italicize the ones you've read part of. Watching the movie or the cartoon doesn't count. Abridged versions don't count either. BTW, according to the BBC if you've read 7 of these, you are above the average.



1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter Series - J.K. 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'Ubervilles - 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 Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’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 Hitchhiker'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
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 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 - 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 Inferno - Dante
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 - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madam 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

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

If you've got any recommendations from the list, let me know! I'm planning on rereading Doyle and Pullman, and then probably going to try and finish up some of the italics of the books I just forgot to keep reading, like Lolita, maybe start some more Austen THAT IS NOT PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, dabble in the curious case etc etc

That being said, some of my recommendations! Middlemarch is super big and long and heavy, but it reads like a countryside Dickens, which means pretty nice to read overall! The size might be daunting, but I can't say it was a bad read. One Hundred Years of Solitude and A Prayer for Owen Meany are both good reads, and I'm pleased they made the list. Dune is great if you like sci-fi, but I've read another one of Kazuo Ishiguro's work and I also highly recommend him, for his style and creative storytelling. I hope I can read his other work too haha crying
wightknight: (Default)

[personal profile] wightknight 2012-01-10 04:05 am (UTC)(link)
Wow this would almost be exactly like my list with a few exceptions wherein I am not as literate as the awesome scarfle lord of high literature.

I am here to say that The Time Traveler's Wife is extremely poignant and touching. It might seem like a sci fi romp from the title, but it actually reads more like realistic fiction, dealing with the consequences of a man who often becomes temporally displaced against his will and his relationship with his wife, whom he first met when he was an adult and she was a little girl.

I would also recommend The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which is also poignant, but more deliberate and anvilicious about it so that it kinda detracts from the effects a little bit. You know the point is that it's going to be a feel-good story because the build-up is so obvious. But it still makes you feel good anyway.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is maddening to me. It's written from the point of view as a boy with autism or Asperger's disease, but by many accounts it is not a very accurate portrayal of the thought processes of an actual person with such a disorder. The main character is, in my opinion, extremely unlikeable with few redeeming personality traits, and it gives the impression that everyone with autism has no emotions apart from selfishness, which I feel is somewhat insulting. ANYWAY, that is just my opinion, a lot of people like it a lot because it is admittedly a very strong effort to describe the world of an autistic person, and as far as I know, few other authors have made such an endeavor.
wightknight: (Default)

[personal profile] wightknight 2012-01-10 04:42 am (UTC)(link)
I secretly kept all my children's books and reread them periodically up until I graduated from college... At which point my mom insisted I clean out my room and I screamed and wept as she removed all offensive reading material (Witch Cat does not inspire thoughts of great maturity). Luckily I saved like two shelves of my favorites by shoving them into the back of my closet behind a trunk. Unluckily, she used the trunk to pack up my old books. Luckily, I distracted her with shiny objects until we went to Taiwan and she forgot about cleaning up and now all of my books are sitting in a trunk in the basement.

......Anyway the point is I suck at reading adult books too. =P Good thing Charlotte's Web is on that list!

The Time Traveler's Wife isn't really a romcom, although it does have humorous sections! It's a little bit depressing, actually... But yeah. The Five People in Heaven probably will make you cry! And then you will feel good because heaven is a good place and everyone feels better when they go to heaven and stuff.

I have finished Dune! You mean just the book? I have read the book, and one of the sequels but not the whole series.
swordspoint: pocketmolecule @ lj Pixiv ID: 18013929 (pic#1272300)

[personal profile] swordspoint 2012-01-10 05:07 am (UTC)(link)
I had to go and count the books I've read because I'm competitive like that. I beat you by six books!


*feels like a well read loser*

Actually, I'm meaning to read Lolita again sometime soon. It would be great if we could do it book club style with other people.
swordspoint: (Default)

[personal profile] swordspoint 2012-01-10 05:40 am (UTC)(link)
I don't think it would be more complicated than an actual book club (where people get stuck reading books they don't want to read). Now I want to organize something like this on plurk or DW.
swordspoint: (Default)

[personal profile] swordspoint 2012-01-11 04:58 am (UTC)(link)
I'll make a plurk about this soon, then.
yanyan: (Default)

[personal profile] yanyan 2012-01-10 02:59 pm (UTC)(link)
give me your brain you butt

ugh seconding what wighty said about time traveler's wife and five people you meet in heaven UGHUHGUHGH i should finish the latter w o w i suck at reading books really don't mind me

but now i will have to read the curious incident too because i have a brother who has asperger's...

Atonement gets meta somewhere in the middle heh and I hated Briony! But all in all I guess it's okay. The movie made her a more sympathetic character so I don't know if I would recommend it!

What is there to recommend to you anyway you are like the Akashic records I am not talking to you
prof: (Default)

[personal profile] prof 2012-01-10 04:05 pm (UTC)(link)
Just when I thought I was getting pretty well-read

I'm 24 books behind you
prof: (Default)

[personal profile] prof 2012-01-11 02:21 am (UTC)(link)
What's it about?
prof: (Default)

[personal profile] prof 2012-01-11 04:06 am (UTC)(link)
Interesting. Which war?
homoerotic: (Bernkastel)

[personal profile] homoerotic 2012-01-11 08:07 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm gonna roll in here and scream Madame Bovary at you. Because everyone in my English class hated it with a passion but I loved it so much!!! The father (mother?) of the modern novel!!! It's dense I guess, but it's to be expected for what it is. I thought it was splendid but you'd probably hate it anyways so

Also, this list needs more Oscar Wilde, gosh.
homoerotic: (Reading time)

[personal profile] homoerotic 2012-01-13 11:33 pm (UTC)(link)
Yesssss the Importance of Being Earnest is so good, the best. I also liked Lady Windermere's Fan, but it's been forever since I read either oh no...

We always talked about Madame Bovary's ovaries. Rip-snorting good time wot.