Floating Leaf (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
floatingleaf) wrote2008-07-01 09:20 pm
floatingleaf) wrote2008-07-01 09:20 pm
Entry tags:
sometimes I read other stuff than slash fics - no really, I do! ;P
Swiped from gairid and rainweaver13:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Unerline the ones you loved.
1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I am reading it now - for the first time... *blushes*)
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6) The Bible (of course I know those fragments that were obligatory reading material at school - but I'm not sure that counts ;)
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) Works of Shakespeare (only the ones everyone knows, I suppose - Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and Twelfth Night - I think ;P)
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 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-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 (this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid)
74) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses - James Joyce (I tried this one, but gave up after a few chapters)
76) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I read a simplified version while preparing for an English language & literature contest during high school; funnily enough, my private tutor never told me it was a simplified version - so for a few years I lived under the impression that I had read the 'real thing'... LOL)
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
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
As this clearly shows, I am not a huge reader of classics. I read some, mostly because they were on my obligatory reading list during school/university - and I am glad they were, because otherwise I might have never picked them up.;) But on the whole, I rather tend to steer clear of what "everyone should read" and discover my own classics. Btw, I can't believe that there isn't even one Mary Renault on this list. Or Jeanette Winterson, for that matter. She's been around long enough to be considered classic by now, I should think (no less so than, say, Margaret Atwood). Her latest novel, The Stone Gods, which I am reading now, is positively stunning. Winterson's style has always been deceptively simple, but nearly every sentence conceals layers of hidden meaning to be uncovered. It seems so effortless - and yet has to be very well thought out in order to hit that close to the mark. I am simply in love with this woman's brain. She amazes me with her ability to combine such vicious, cynical humor with such deep humanism. The Stone Gods is a merciless parody of our modern times - and a powerful allegory of what it means to be human (among other things). I am hugely tempted to quote massive fragments of the book right here - but that shall have to wait for another post. It's getting late again...:(
gairid and rainweaver13: 1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Unerline the ones you loved.
1) Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2) The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I am reading it now - for the first time... *blushes*)
3) Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4) Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5) To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6) The Bible (of course I know those fragments that were obligatory reading material at school - but I'm not sure that counts ;)
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) Works of Shakespeare (only the ones everyone knows, I suppose - Hamlet, Macbeth, Othello, Romeo & Juliet and Twelfth Night - I think ;P)
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 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-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 (this was one of my favorite books when I was a kid)
74) Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75) Ulysses - James Joyce (I tried this one, but gave up after a few chapters)
76) The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77) Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78) Germinal - Emile Zola
79) Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray (I read a simplified version while preparing for an English language & literature contest during high school; funnily enough, my private tutor never told me it was a simplified version - so for a few years I lived under the impression that I had read the 'real thing'... LOL)
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
99) Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100) Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
As this clearly shows, I am not a huge reader of classics. I read some, mostly because they were on my obligatory reading list during school/university - and I am glad they were, because otherwise I might have never picked them up.;) But on the whole, I rather tend to steer clear of what "everyone should read" and discover my own classics. Btw, I can't believe that there isn't even one Mary Renault on this list. Or Jeanette Winterson, for that matter. She's been around long enough to be considered classic by now, I should think (no less so than, say, Margaret Atwood). Her latest novel, The Stone Gods, which I am reading now, is positively stunning. Winterson's style has always been deceptively simple, but nearly every sentence conceals layers of hidden meaning to be uncovered. It seems so effortless - and yet has to be very well thought out in order to hit that close to the mark. I am simply in love with this woman's brain. She amazes me with her ability to combine such vicious, cynical humor with such deep humanism. The Stone Gods is a merciless parody of our modern times - and a powerful allegory of what it means to be human (among other things). I am hugely tempted to quote massive fragments of the book right here - but that shall have to wait for another post. It's getting late again...:(