Wednesday, August 13, 2008

A Book blog

What you do is, look at the list below, and then:
bold the ones you’ve read;
[bracket] the ones you love
italicise the ones you intend to read.

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 - lots of it, but not all, so I've part bolded
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 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I’ve read the bulk of them)
15 [Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier]
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks - I really struggled with this one, and could not finish it
18 [Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger] (I really loved Franny and Zooey, and also Raise High the Roof Beams Carpenters)
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 - my second favourite Dickens after Our Mutual Friend
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’s Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll]
30 [The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - I loved the film as well, the David Jason/Michael Hordern one]
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- this is in the pile by the bed to be read - Loved a Thousand Splendid Suns
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - no no no NO!!!
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
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 - I like the idea of his books, but never quite get the thought to read them
51
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 I haven't bracketed this, but I was really moved by it, loved isn't the right word
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 - oh dear God...
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 [Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome]
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. 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
I am just so crap. I know no one reads it anyway, but this isn't for anyone else, it's for me in years to come.

It's so long since I wrote that we're now three weeks into the holidays. We've been to Devon for a week and the boys and I have just come back from a little break in Wales with my friend G and her boys in a caravan on a lovely site - spoiled only by torrential, and I mean torrential rain - it's in the mountains which made it worse. I feel great taht I've done this - taken the two of them away, done swimming and stuff, all alone - G and I are like Thelma and Louise (just without Brad Pitt and the driving off a cliff at the end). G and I have been friends since the first day at University, her boys are 3 and 5. It's been so great to go away with her, it's been years since we spent such a concentrated time in each others company, and it was so... easy. We have lots in common, and we are completely honest with each other - always have been. And that is so good.