1 Pride and Prejudice X
2 The Lord of the Rings X
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens X
Total so far: 5
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare: X
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total so far: 8
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 X
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
Total so far: 10
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 X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Total so far: 11
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne X
seriously, I've read both original Pooh books
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
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 X
Total so far: 14
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert X
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 X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
Total so far: 17
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
Total so far: 17
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville X
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
(read the whole damned thing, IN YER FACE)
76 The Inferno – Dante X
(should get extra credit for having read Purgatorio and Paradiso as well)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Total so far: 21
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
Total so far: 23
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole X
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
(tried as a kid, bored the shit out of me)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables — Victor Hugo X
Total: 28
I protest as well, especially getting double credit for Narnia/LW&W but not the entire Divine Comedy, and I say I get a score of INFINITY PLUS ONE for reading all of Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Remembrance of Things Past). Read it in the same freaking semester as Ulysses, which explains why I am completely insane.
1. What author do you own the most books by? Probably Roger Zelazny.
2. What book do you own the most copies of? The Bible, due to gifts and thefts from hotel rooms.
3. Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Don't get me started on that. I have a peeve about that stupid peeve. A meta-peeve, if you will.
4. What fictional character are you secretly in love with? If I told you it wouldn't be a secret, dumbass.
5. What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)? I honestly don't know for certain, but possibly Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber.
6. What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? I think it was Fantastic Voyage.
7. What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I posted about it. That Vonnegut book I suspect he didn't really write, at least not while awake.
8.What is the best book you've read in the past year? To be honest I haven't read much in the past year, so probably the latest Donaldson book, which was good but not great.
9.If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? I, Claudius and/or Claudius The God.
10. What book would you most like to see made into a movie? A Night in the Lonesome October, by Zelazny.
11.What book would you least like to see made into a movie? Any of Donaldson's Covenant books, because they'd just fuck them all up. Horribly.
12. Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. Don't remember one. I'll make up one later and pretend I really dreamed it.
13.What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult? Do comics count? In which case, Garth Ennis' hilariously gross crap. Or perhaps my book of the complete Howard The Duck 70s comics.
14.What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Ulysses was slowest going on a time-per-page basis, but I found Proust (with his longwinded parentheses full of both extended metaphors and unfamiliar place-names, forging ahead like a runaway train through uncharted territory while it makes its own winding, confusing track, sometimes spiraling around d'Absurde Hill, the Beulleshitte Valley, or the noble Chateau d'Pretensionne several times and then crossing back over itself, other times seeming to jump ahead without the connecting bits of track being noticeable behind the passengers, who invariably would wonder -- if they really existed, which they do not -- how the train got to the strange locale they find themselves in, yet not particularly care as the fog of uncertainty makes the surroundings barely detectable at best, and thoroughly uninteresting, until they can hardly stand to wait until they reach their destination, and when they finally do, cannot remember why they left in the first place, much as you will not remember what this sentence was about before this parenthetical aside began and will have to go back to the beginning to remind yourself; I had to do that myself to finish writing it) to be, overall, the most difficult to get through.
15. What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? The Two Gentlemen of Verona, unless you count the parody of Pericles, Prince of Tyre I saw once.
16. Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Like godfry, I'm not fond of either, but there are some French novels I sort of liked even though I wouldn't reread them, which is more than I can say for Russian ones.
17. Roth or Updike? Neither.
18.David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Heard of them, haven't read either.
19. Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? All have their place, but I've read way too damned much of all of them. Paradise Lost is brilliant, but Milton deserved to go blind for those turgid essays of his. I still love a lot of Shakespeare, and while I'm too lazy to slog through Chaucer anymore, I had a professor in college who convinced me it was beautiful stuff.
20. Austen or Eliot? Not terribly fond of either.
21.What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? Not nearly enough history. I especially regret not having read more Gibbon or Durant.
22.What is your favorite novel? Tough to say. I tend to revise my opinion too often.
23. Play? I haven't been to many good plays other than Shaxpur productions. So I'll pick Medea The Musical just because it was damned funny.
24. Poem? You're gonna think I'm kidding, but probably Ginsberg's Howl. Actually, I'm gonna count Roy Harper's "The Lord's Prayer," which is more spoken-word than musical. One of those.
25.Essay? I don't really have a favorite that stands out. Lately I've been digging Leonard Pitts' columns, but I don't know if those count. As for classic essays, per above, anything but Milton. I sort of like Montaigne.
26.Work of nonfiction? Will Durant's first volume, Our Oriental Heritage. I wish I had the patience to read the rest of them. Yes, I know there are some inaccuracies. It's still fascinating and achingly well-written.
27.Who is your favorite writer? I'll just cop out and say Roger Zelazny, although I've probably finally moved on.
28.Who is the most overrated writer alive today? It's not fair to pick on writers I haven't actually read; the most overrated writers are ones I wouldn't be caught dead reading. Like, say, what's-his-DaVinci-Code-face.
29.What is your desert island book? Ah yes, the pick one book question. I'd probably pick Shakespeare's complete plays, not because I'm so highbrow or anything, but just because it would give me a really huge book to read full of a lot of stories that are very different from each other, and all well-written.
30.And... what are you reading right now? I haven't started a new one yet. Maybe next time I go, I can have 10 damned minutes at the library to find a book without Li'l Puppet dragging me back to the kids' section.
BBC Literacy Questionnaire
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Linear Mode
