ok I'll bite.

[mistletoe]

Well I may not have read anything since 1994 to speak of, but I haven't done too badly on the meme reading thingy. Have bolded, underlined and occasionally italicised just in case the urge moves me. I have to teach one of them anyway. Is Shakespeare the only person to have written any plays?

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Bad start)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I kinda skim read the last one)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (Gah! My eyes!)
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 (Best book evah)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare OK I've read about 14)
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 Hitch Hiker'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 - 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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown  (Would not sully my brain with such pulp fiction)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 (seen the film – didn’t like it)
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 This is where angst began)
68 Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding (Tosh)
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (I don't get it. Is it an American thing?)
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 (I always refused to read anything with a little girl called Titty in it)
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
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 (What, it's not part of the Complete Works?)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Lack of Austen reading there you'll notice. The only one I have read is not on the list. I've read more Dickens than that too. I've also read everything Waugh wrote. Where's Saul Bellow? I used to like him.

Back from Seahouses this morning after failing to win the quiz and staying up until 5 am talking. Yiss!

Comments

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

I think Moby Dick is an American thing to some extent. It's one of our major epics, and I think it works particularly well for readers who have some knowledge of the literary period (with Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson, and Stowe occupying the other major author positions).

But to me it works on so many levels -- it's a sea-faring book, it's a tragedy, it's an allegory, it's a monomaniacal quest narrative, it's a story of male friendship and love, it's an exposure of an industry and a profession, it's an exploration of good and evil, it's an examination of class and racial tensions, etc.

And really, to me it's a kind of ur-novel, because it so clearly embodies that novel as the genre that consumes and features all other genres.

There are definitely a few novels on the list that I haven't read because I haven't heard much about them -- probably an effect of the authors being contemporary English or Scottish writers like Iain Banks. We all have our entrenched canons and well-know writers that aren't at all familiar or seen as pivotal in other countries and regions.

[mistletoe54.livejournal.com]

Wow! I see your point(s) and applaud your defense. I should try to get hold of a copy. My knowledge is largely/solely based on the Gregory Peck film; what it's like on the page I didn't know other than They call me Ishmael.*weak*

I have read Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, but the others you mention haven't leapt from the shelves to my open arms. What do you recommend for Ralph Waldo Emerson?

[entrenous88.livejournal.com]

So Emerson as you probably already know is in the main an essayist. He did write poetry (most of it not great) and kept wonderful journals, but the lectures and the essays are the place to go.

His lectures are great; he was known as a fine orator, in part because of his ministry training. The ones to try for sure are "The American Scholar" (and yes, absolutely about academic pursuits in the United States and breaking influence from Continental/English patterns and mentors, so interesting for that reason); and "The Divinity School Address" which gives you an idea of the complicated intersections for intellectuals who, like Emerson, were from a religious tradition but also transcendental thinkers whose views sounded to others nearly atheistic.

The really wonderful essays are: "Self-Reliance" (just wonderfully inspiring as well as emblematic for that period of thought): "The Over-Soul", and perhaps the short essays in the volume "Nature" (not to be confused with a later essay "Nature" in the second collection of essays).

Hope that's helpful!

For Hawthorne, I highly recommend the short stories ("Young Goodman Brown", "The Birth Mark", "The Minister's Black Veil", "Rappaccini's Daughter") and The Blithedale Romance (one of my favorite novels). I was never much interested in The Scarlett Letter after reading it the first time, and his other works have some wonderful offerings.

[mistletoe54.livejournal.com]

Thank you for taking the time to answer my query. I shall try our library to see if the Emerson works are available here. Seeing as my summer 6 week holidays arrive at the end of July that should be enough time to have a go. I don't know whether to hope for wet weather or not so I'll have an excuse to stay in and actually read.

This meme has proved really useful!