elderberrywine | (no subject)

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I am so susceptible to these things!

but this really is a rather fine list - *g*

Since I plan on reading every book in the world, some day, I only italicized the ones I've actually bought and not yet read. Sooner or later, I'm sure I'll get to the rest as well. ;D

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
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 (Read all 3, loved book 1)
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 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
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 About half of the books.
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (This is part of #33)
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 Oh, look. This appears to be at the bottom of the pile. Right above Ulysses.
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 - But I plan on getting this one.
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 Oh, there it is. At the bottom.
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 Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
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
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 (Part of #14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Oooh. 76.

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I haven't read as many as you have, but I'm a bit over the half-way mark, at least.

I liked A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time was one of those books I went back and bought a second copy of, just so I could lend it out to other people.

Wow! I was just a little over 30.

Wow, another heavy-duty reader.

You might like Swallows and Amazons.

Oh bugger. I'm signed in to the wrong journal.

A Prayer for Owen Meany, and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, eh? *scoots them up closer to the top of the pile*

Thanks!

Heh. But then, I'm a Very Old Person, and so that helps.

Well, I did better on this one than I usually do since it seemed to be skewed towards the "classics" and they're my favorite kind of read.

There were a couple that rang no bells whatsoever, though.

Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell? The Secret History - Donna Tartt (I'm assuming that isn't The Secret Life of Bees book, then)? I guess I need to be googling these.

Ah, that does sound like a find. I was getting him confused with Arthur Rackham though. That would have been even more delectable.

This really is an interesting list. Aside from a sprinkling of books I've *never even heard of* (which I'm willing to take on faith as stuff so recent I've ignored it along with most of Real Life in the past decade or so), the titles are all either worth reading for themselves or so you'll know what other people see in them. Which is which varies with the reader, of course. There are something like 20% women writers (accounting for Anonymous and maybe a pseudonym or two) and at least 10% works not originally in English but translatable for English-language readers, which makes the listing better-rounded than *ahem* some previous book-lists we've seen.

Would it be reasonable to say that most or all of the works were popular successes, some for wildly different reasons, with a few honorable mentions for works like Ulysses that are influential even if not as much read? Maybe I mean that the majority of these works started something -- either series by that author, like HP by JKR and Dune, or genres or sub-genres like Rebecca and the Sherlock Holmes stories. Some, like Da Vinci Code are interesting to us *as* popular successes even though they're flawed writing. For all that, there's a kind of non-genre tone to the list as a whole, even though some of the books initiated genres. For instance, I'd love to see Dorothy Sayers' mysteries here (at least Gaudy Night on its own merits as a novel, if nothing else), but I can also appreciate that they were written for a subset of the reading public in a way the Sherlock Holmes stories, at the time they were published, were not.

The listing itself seems a bit sloppy, notably the Shakespeare and C.S. Lewis entries. And those leave open the question why "All Jane Austen's novels" isn't a single entry also. That would leave five new spaces to add titles that seem worthwhile to the list. Hmmm...
The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne (Well, I kind of liked it in school, which is more than I can say for Moby Dick or anything by Dickens.)
Short stories of Shirley Jackson
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by Frank Baum
The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula LeGuin.

Other inexplicable omissions include Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Virginia Wolfe, Mary Shelley, and since we're including children-of-all-ages classics, P.L. Travers with Mary Poppins and Noel Streatfield.

I never heard of those either.

I adore Winnie the Pooh - Piglet is my favorite character. I also love Jane Eyre - oh, Edward....

You know, the three that I was quite surprised not to find here were The Scarlet Letter, Frankenstein, and Huckleberry Finn, the latter two of which I love. Especially since they are staples of high school lit. As is The Lottery, by Shirley Jackson, for that matter. (Although We Have Always Lived in the Castle is a lot more fun.) And along those lines, I should think Romeo and Juliet would be the one Shakespeare play singled out, since it's the one read in high school these days. In my time, it was Julius Caesar. I guess these days young emo love trumps over politics. ;D

Also true - why no Northanger Abby or Mansfield Park, hmm? Doubling the CS Lewis seemed definitely sloppy, and really, people. Dune? May as well stick Stranger in a Strange Land in there, too.

You are definitely right on the shortage of women authors - of course Wolfe should be on there. I'd vote for To the Lighthouse, my all time favorite of hers. And I'd go for the Oz series, at least the earlier ones by Baum himself. (Oooh! *waves hand* I'll have Ozma of Oz, please!)

Da Vinci Code? *sigh* I guess you're right about that one, but if they had to throw a classic popular success in there, I'd go for The Godfather. Now, there was a pageturner, and no mistake!

Alas, I also don't see my pet two favs from my teenage years - Ramona and Lorna Doone. They just don't write star-crossed lovers like they used to. *brandishes cane, adjusts teeth*

Everyone in Winnie the Pooh is adorable, but Piglet is adorable plus.

Jane Eyre is the ultimate Romantic Novel. Charlotte Bronte got it right the first time out. You know, much as I totally adore Dickens, if they wanted to throw a 19th century British novel in for a high school lit class, you really couldn't do better than Jane Eyre. Madwoman locked in the attic for the win!

Your icon is watching mine, I can tell. ;D

Friday and a little wine, and literary conversation, oh yeah. And d'accord on liking Shirley Jackson's cheerful stuff as much or more than her shocking ones. I really think the Austen novels should be considered a set (if Narnia is, for goodness' sake, which they have beat by a mile for quality of humanity), since there are evidently sets being considered. All of Shakespeare, hmm, really? Is that supposed to be homogeneous?

Actually, except for the Bible and Shakespeare, it's all 19th century and up (I might have missed an 18th-century title or two, perhaps, but there weren't many if I did), and therefore pretty much readable for anyone literate in English. No Robinson Crusoe, which is definitely worth it but a bit archaic. No Jonathan Swift! No Sheridan and Congreve, who are frankly pretty abstruse, but popular in their time. My late 18th-century favorite would be Liaisons Dangereuses, but it's not quite as Standard Canon as the list generally is. No Marlow Faust and no Goethe Faust, again both a bit heavy going, however universal they are about God and Man and Mortality.

You're right that Dune kind of sticks out as Not As Good As It Should Be, though it started *something* -- not so much the dreadful series itself, but SF with ecological backgrounding, maybe. And, much as I love Heinlein's storytelling on occasion (even Stranger), same thing. That shimmer of fiction-is-more-than-humanity-instead-of-less doesn't usually make it in SF, at least not Old Boys' SF. Do you think so? Maybe I'm speaking from too much familiarity with SF and not enough with George Elliott and so on. I hit a lot of 1850s-era classics and just *bounce* (though Austen and Thackery have definite appeal, and I read Alcott early enough to like it and not so early I was traumatized by Beth dying, which seems to happen to some 10-year-olds). But anyway, the SF has an element of world- and science-building, instead of purely human-character building, that gives it a different appeal than the standard classics of Great Lit'ratur. Do you think this is a legitimate difference for Universal Values (or whatever you judge for a canon of "classics"), or something that should have its own place? Even if so, I can see that Varley or somebody might be a better choice than Herbert, but there's something to chew on in worldbuilding as well as character-building. Also, I want to nominate A Mote In God's Eye, which I've read more times than I can count, less for the human characters than for the Moties. Constructing non-human characters for human readers -- isn't that *harder* and therefore better than re-telling humans woes? Joan Vinge and some others have done the same, and while I don't feel any visceral appeal, I can see that Cordwainer Smith was doing it too. And Ursula LeGuin. And...

*wine cooler #2 -- it was a *long* week at work* *brandishes matching cane*

Yeah, Godfather is much more a 20th-century classics than Da Vinci Code. I hear it was even a better movie. I missed the two starcrossed classics you cite, but I've heard about them, and if Rebecca and Gone with the Wind are classics in this sense, they're in there too. And Forever Amber! If nothing else, that led directly to the Angelique series, which is the trashiest fun ever in print.

Oh, yes, forgot Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Noel Coward. And George Bernard Shaw.

*joins you in raising a glass of the good stuff*

God, yes, Friday. Although I'm teaching summer school right now, so I do at least have Fridays off. Of course, there's a reason for that. Ah, such tasty points you raise.

I read humongous amounts of sci fi growing up since my father was a huge fan of it. This would be back in the '50s and '60s, and he belonged to a Science Fiction Book of the Month club, so there was new stuff every month. It was pretty much what we think of now as the Golden Age classics too, and I read every bit of it along with him (and then there was Twilight Zones, and Outer Limits, and oh course, oh, be still my heart! Star Trek, but that's a whole other kettle of fish). The world-building was stupendous and it was very good with the big-ticket ideas, but I really think most sci fi was rife with, might I say, guyness. Characters were there to serve their purpose, but few lived and breathed for me. This can't be because of the fact the authors were by far and away male, because that was certainly true of most of literature, which is chock full of glorious characters. I just rather think that it was characteristic of the type of authors that were attracted to sci fi. Now this might just be my faulty memory of the whole matter, for I have to admit it's been a very long time since I read sci fi in the quantity that I did back then. And I haven't read nearly as much LeGuin as I ought to. *adds her to the list*

You're right, it was pretty much British and Austin and up. Not even the customary nod to War and Peace (which I swear I'm going to read one of these days). Crime and Punishment, well OK, that's the usual, but what about The Idiot or The Brothers Karamazov? They're not nearly such a drag. Actually, I'm wildly fond of the other Russian authors you don't hear so much of - Turgenev, Gogol, and Goncharov. Tasty! And what about the French - what, no Balzac? I have managed to miss Liaisons Dangereuses, although the movie was delectable. *also adds to list*

Edith Wharton! Of course. But can't have her without Henry James, you are right on that.

Oh, man, Forever Amber! I just read that a couple of years ago, and it is absolutely awesome. Historical smut, the way it ought to be done! And of course that would bring up Georgette Heyer, whom I have just recently met, and adore. And of course, where is the Wodehouse love? Politics aside, he was a genius.

I think we should make this list nothing past 1980 need apply. Hasn't passed the test of time yet, you know. *cackles one who passed that ages ago*

As in, vacuuming. I am now sore, because vacuuming involves moving furniture. However, it appears that the ants have been vanquished, possibly for the season.

And, Wodehouse! Yes! It would be pretty easy to bundle all the books, or at least all the Jeeves books, as a single entry. I wanted to discount Heyer because it's light romance (not the heavy kind, where people are realistic and often heartbroken, but strongly stylized even if Heyer did it herself and wasn't following an existing genre's rules). However, if Jeeves and silly-ass Bertie are classics, Heyer and her clever heroines cannot be far behind. I'm even told that Heyer was transparently writing 20s Bright Young Things (exactly the kind Bertie constantly meets and sees married off to his friends) in Regency dress-up, though my Bright Young Thing quotient is so low that I wouldn't be sure what to look for. But Heyer is adorable, with the possible exception of a couple of sincere historical biographies that fall flat.

I grew up reading so much SF that I'm probably warped by it also. As far as I can peer through the mists of Asimov and Clarke, I think the deal with SF isn't that big-ticket ideas necessarily dwarf the characters, but that American SF in particular was shaped as a genre by writers who preferred ideas to characters. (Many British writers of the same era, for instance John Wyndham, took a more character-centered approach. It seemed that they mostly wrote post-Apocalyptic plotlines, I'm guessing due to WWI and WWII hangover, and I wasn't buying the downers.) We tend to class anything less straightforward as non-SF, or at least transcending SF, like Sturgeon. I know I read anything with an SF label and didn't much differentiate the Brave New World sort of fiction from the I, Robot sort, but neither was doing what Fitzgerald or Lewis Sinclair was doing. And some days I preferred the robots to the humans. At least SF gave me the choice.

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Friday, oh yeah

Re: Friday, oh yeah

Saturday, day of labor