Sunday, May 28, 2006

How does your reading list stack up?

A few days ago, Liz at Finding Life Hard? posted an interesting exercise for those of us who love to read. Don't know who originated the list or why they chose the books they did, but it's fun to play along. I hope it's all right with Liz (and whoever started the darn thing) that I changed a couple of the ways of marking the books to make it more blogger-computer-friendly. Here's what you do:

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read. Make red the ones you've started to read but never finished. Italicize the ones you might read. Make green the ones you won’t. Star (*) the ones on your book shelf. Place (parentheses) around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

OK, here's how my list comes out:

* The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
* The Catcher in the Rye - J D Salinger
* The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
* The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
* To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J K Rowling
The Life of Pi - Yann Martel
* Animal Farm: A Fairy Story
- George Orwell
* Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
* The Hobbit - J R R. Tolkien
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
* Lord of the Flies - William Golding
* Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
* 1984 - George Orwell
* Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
* One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
* Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
* The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
* Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
* The Secret History - Donna Tartt
* Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C S Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
* Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
* Atonement - Ian McEwan
(The Shadow of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
* The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
* The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert
Sula - Toni Morrison

* Cold Mountain - Charles Frazier
The Alchemist - Paulo Coehlo
White Teeth - Zadie Smith
The House of Mirth - Edith Wharton
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
* Brighton Rock - Graham Greene
The Moor’s Last Sigh - Salman Rusdie
We Need to Talk About Kevin - Lionel Schriver

(Disgrace - J M Coetzee)
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
(The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kuresh)
Small Island - Andrea Levy
(Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake)
* Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
* Perfume - Patrick Suskind
(The Reader - Bernand Shlink)
(Father and Son - Larry Brown)
(Crooked Hearts - Robert Boswell)
She's Come Undone - Wally Lamb
Postcards - E. Annie Proulx
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (stories) - Robert Olen Butler
(Defiance - Carole Maso)
(Being Dead - Jim Crace)
(And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos - John Berger)
Holy the Firm - Annie Dillard
(Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance - Stephen Herrero)
(Desert Notes: Reflections in the Eye of a Raven - Barry Lopez)
(River Notes: The Dance of Herons - Barry Lopez)
* Ragtime - E L Doctorow
* The House of Sand and Fog - Andre Dubus
(The Last of the Just - Andre Schwartz-Bart)
* Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
(Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson)
* Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
* The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
A Bell for Adano - John Hersey
* The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Herzog - Saul Bellow
(Ripening Seed - Colette)
* Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
(The Woman Warrier - Maxine Hong Kingston)
(The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin)
(The House of the Spirits - Isabel Allende)
(The Lover - Marguerite Duras)
* Chocolat - Joanne Harris
(Labyrinth - Kate Mosse)
(Harold and the Duck - Bruce Robinson)
(A Gathering Light - Jennifer Donnelly)
(How I Live Now - Meg Rosoff)
(Something Invisible - Siobhán Parkinson)

What does your list look like?

2 comments:

Milan said...

I urge you to reconsider on a few of these. The following are excellent books:

Dune - Frank
The Moor’s Last Sigh - Salman Rusdie

And you really ought to finish Anna Karenina. While it is long and complex, it is ultimately worthwhile.

Liz Hinds said...

Look out for The Shadow of the Wind. It's a many-layered love story cum literary mystery. Excellent.