Book Club

I saw this meme on Stash Haus' blog earlier in the week and coincidentally on a couple of others on the same day, so I thought I should give it a go. I was a bookish child and so got a lot of reading of the classics done then; now it's limited to commuting but that does allow me to motor through at least one novel a week and so I have done rather better than the "average" six (I know!). The below is actually quite useful in identifying what I should be reading in 2009.

Convention:

1. Look at the list and highlight in bold those you have read.
2. Italicise those you intend to read.
3. Place * after the books you love - I did try to keep this to top five, but I think I've ended up with ten.
4. Post your list so we can try and track down these people who’ve only read six and force books upon them.

The list:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen * (A girly choice of favourite, but I was an impressionable 14-year-old when Colin Firth was getting his britches all wet and it has stuck with me.)

2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (On an ill-fated holiday in France which we decided to share with another family, with whom we had nothing in common whatsoever. Thank god for Tolkein in that situation.)

3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (I remember failing to read this at school and still managing to make up the right answers for a test on it.  But I've read it properly since.)

4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6. The Bible (From cover to cover, even. I just thought I should. I feel this means I can make an informed decision that it's utter bullshit.)
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 * (I adore how nasty Hardy is to his characters. Also, they're all set around where I'm from, in Wessex.)
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (I've started this a couple of times.  No idea why I haven't managed to finish it.)
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (What, all of it? Seriously? Even the poetry? I've had a good stab but can't claim to have read the whole lot yet.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (Made me cry on a long flight to Bangkok, but then that may have been a side effect of being squished into a middle seat with no seat-back entertainment.)
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 (One day...)
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams * (My absolute favourite book(s) of all time.)
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 - CS Lewis (Why is this duplicating #33?)
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (Hated it, as it happens.)
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 (And others by Mr Brown, I'm ashamed to admit.)
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 * (So good I had to re-read it last week. I love dystopias.)
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert (This is a book? I have been forced by my darling to watch the film a couple of times.)
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 (Ooh, shocker, what with all the knitting. Must correct over the hols I think.)
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 * (Even more harrowing than Tess above. Great.)
68. Bridget Jones’ 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 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 * (Just wonderful.)
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 (So is this in addition to having read The Complete Works? Do you have to read it twice?)
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I think that makes a round 60 I've read, so I am ten times better read than the general population.  That makes me feel very smug indeed.