Comments on: On books, and lists of books

By: Kate Battersby

Kate Battersby — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 19:55:22 +0000

I like this! But why, oh why, isn't the luminous 'The God of Small Things' included?

Let me know when you decide to tackle Hardy, Ro - notice its big fat absence on your to-do list!!! Maybe I missed something but, although before reading 'Tess' and 'Madding Crowd' I anticipated quite a chore, in fact I found them woefully less substantial than expected and couldn't really see past all that ridiculous bodice-ripping. So only a sort-of chore; but not in the dense Tolstoy or Dickens or Joyce (who I can't stand, sorry - all that bloody atmosphere) sense.

Like you, I failed to get far enough with 'A Suitable Boy', though I don't quite understand why, several times; maybe it felt necessary, and impossible, to live another life for a while. This it is not a book to do by 'alves - oh, so rich, and engrossing, and peopled, and, well, long.

That's quite enough from the Oxford comma for now. Glad love (or whatever it is) has found you.

Kate X

By: onedia

onedia — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 08:22:12 +0000

I like reading lists and such tools as librarything . I enjoy book discussion clubs as long as they are a bit loose on procedure. Books are food for the spirit and the mind and the imagination. They are survival tools. I probably ready about the same number on your list and some partially because I disliked them and I refuse to trudge through a book I dislike unless it is required for a course and thankfully I left that behind so thank God I will never have to read Moby Dick again.

However, perhaps for people who love the smell and feel of books as much as the words in them I am a grateful convert to the joys of audio books and praise libraries that give them to me for my mp3 player or pc. I can now read whenever…but I will NOW even “read” authors that I dislike or tome's because they are so much more pleasing when read to me by someone who is quite good at it.

By: Books for the New Year « Inane Bits

Books for the New Year « Inane Bits — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 20:07:56 +0000

[...] made the resolution and I forgot the whole thing for a while, until I was reminded of it again by a blog post (I’ve read only 13 books on the list, by the [...]

By: Hazel Field

Hazel Field — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:48:16 +0000

that didn't quite work as the bold disappeared – hmmm. me computer illieterate!

By: Hazel Field

Hazel Field — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 12:46:58 +0000

. 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 (well a childrens illustrated one anyhow)
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 – (nope, not all of it. Not yet.)
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD 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 (Got to improve my Dickens ratings – this is unforgivable!)
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (around Cambodia – great for squashing mozzies!)
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 – 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
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
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 - - love it on video though
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 – love the film
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 – 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 (MUST READ!)
85. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (urg, have started at least three times…)
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

Enjoyed going through the list - pretty good on Thomas Hardy and Russian literature. Not so good on Dickens

By: sarahfortuna

sarahfortuna — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:21:34 +0000

Geez, thanks for tagging me so I have to admit having read only about 10 things off this list. I would come up with some great justification – probably citing post modernism at some point – for not having read more of these books…but I guess it's probably just because Dickens just seems like hard work sometimes.

By: Kat

Kat — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 05:06:13 +0000

*now

*ashamed*

By: Kat

Kat — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 01:40:01 +0000

Ohh fun seeing what you read, I think you have read more than me so clearly I know despise you as an elitist. I agree with the comment that there are several books by single authors (Dickens, Austen etc), forgot to mention that on my post.

By: Rowan the Human

Rowan the Human — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:26:23 +0000

Thanks for commenting! I've had a look at your blog – a welcome discovery. Will definitely add Rhett and Scarlett to my friends list ASAP!

By: Rowan the Human

Rowan the Human — Sat, 16 Jan 2010 20:25:23 +0000

Eek, didn't remember that post of Sarah's! I just owned up to her that I am a filthy plagiarist; she took it quite well, considering.

Thanks for your many thoughts, David. I tend to disagree with you about 'traditional', non-Joycean stories in that I think they serve some sort of deep function, that the formula is reassuring and reinforcing or something. That said, I've only read Portrait so I can't really respond until I've got Ulysses and F's Wake under my belt.

I'm wondering about audiobooks - I am an avid devourer of these and I wonder whether hearing Joyce read by someone intimitely familiar with the voices he uses could be quite an experience. I know it's really good with Dylan Thomas, for instance, to capture the cadences, etc.