reading

i've not been having as much internet time of late. some of it is because i've been doing some other fun stuff, but also because i've had a couple of things thrown at me out of left field which have taken up time. i'm also supposed to be writing up my speech from the women's association conference, but not tonight.

while there are a lot of serious things to write about, i'm not in the mood tonight. so i thought i'd consider the list of 100 books that i've seen around the place over the last week. generally, i think people who put up the list just want to show off how well-read they are. but hey, i'm just as much a show-off as the next person! so the list is below, i've put the ones i've read in a different font & the ones i've read partially in italics. i've put a star next to the ones on my bookshelves.

i'm currently trying to get through captain corelli's mandolin, which is a bit of coincidence. i'm finding it heavy going, and it has a few icky bits. this is something i find happens more with male writers - i'm thinking "snow falling on cedars", "the world according to garp" & a couple of others, which just have random gross stuff that doesn't actually add to the story line. it's not that i have problem with portrayals of reality, that can be graphic and horrific, but this stuff seems just seems unnecessary in the scheme of things. or maybe it's just me.

as others have mentioned, the list is a bit wierd. eg it has the chronicles of narnia, then the lion, the witch & the wardrobe, which is a double up (& the former is 7 books, not one). i haven't read all shakespeare's plays, but have read mcbeth & romeo & juliet. there are some notable omissions, rudyard kipling & oscar wilde come immediately to mind, but i'm sure there are others. i can't believe they've left off steinbeck's "east of eden" but included others, and that dickens gets so many on the list. also i've italicised the bible because you can't avoid seeing bits of it here & there, and i've read a few passages. i've read heaps of enid blyton books in my childhood, but can't remember if i've read the particular one they've listed so haven't marked it as read.

anyway, here goes:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen*
2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien*
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’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy*
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien*
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. 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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams*
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 - C.S. Lewis*
34 Emma -Jane Austen*
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen*
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis*
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 - A.A. 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 - L.M. 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
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 - 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 - E.B. 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*

so there you go. 40 books read, 8 partly read. a few i'll definitely get around to reading.