Book meme

I haven't done a meme in a long time, but any meme that makes me feel well-read is worth doing. I won't tag anyone. Play along if you like, and let me know if you did so I can see your list.

Instructions:

• Bold all the books you have read
• Underline those you loved &/or have read more than once
• Italicize books on your To Be Read list (books you own just haven’t read yet)
• Add an asterisk to those you started but didn’t/couldn’t finish

A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving * I’ve never been a huge John Irving fan
A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Beloved – Toni Morrison
Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Complete Works of Shakespeare(actually, I haven’t finished, but I don’t like the implications of “can’t” finish that go with the asterisk.)
Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes (I read it in Spanish. Does that count?)
Dracula - Bram Stoker
Dune - Frank Herbert
Emma - Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
Germinal - Emile Zola
Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell – Susanna Clarke *
Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Middlesex: A Novel – Jeffrey Eugenides
Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
My Antonia – Willa Cather
Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Northanger Abby – Jane Austen
Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
On The Road - Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Possession - A.S. Byatt
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
The Bible
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown * (I tried—I really did—but I just. Didn’t. Like. It.)
The Divine Comedy – Dante Alighieri
The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien * more of the Just Didn’t Get It
The Hunchback of Notre Dame - Victor Hugo
The Iliad - Homer
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien * Again with the Just Didn’t Get It
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
The Odyssey - Homer
The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton
The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame * (did I finish this one? I don’t remember.)
The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Ulysses - James Joyce
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down - Richard Adams * Once again with the Just Didn’t Get It
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West – Gregory Maguire * more and more of the Just Didn’t Get It—although I’m dying to see the stage show
Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

And you? Which are your favorites/most disliked on this list?

Comments

[Elspeth]

My favorites on that list are the Jane Austen books and Confederacy of Dunces. I did CoD as an audio book, and it was really entertaining. I couldn't get past the first few pages of Wicked either, and tried to read the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but couldn't get too far in it either.

[cindy]

Fun list! I'm glad I'm not the only one who couldn't get through Lord of the Rings.

(Oh, and I love the Beer Butt Chicken concept.)

[Carrie K]

I'm with suec on Confederacy of Dunces. Many people who otherwise have perfectly good taste in books loved this but I just could not slog through it. I've tried a few times. No.

Ditto for Wicked! I enjoyed about half of it then .....was over it.

[kate]

Really happy to see Rohinton Minstry on the list - a favourite author of mine.

Like all the childhood books - such nostalgia. The Narnia series was a favourite, as was The Secret Garden, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Winnie the Pooh.

Life of Pi was perhaps the best ending I have ever read, although the book itself didn't stun me.

I haven't read many of the modern ones, as I have to wait until they are available at the library!

[bezzie]

I've read hardly any of those. I'd feel bad, but I have this weird thing about reading authors that have penises. And it seems like a majority of the authors on there had penises.

[suec]

so a confederacy of dunces is on the very short list of books which I, well, loathe. Tried to read it a few times because people with whom I otherwise share book tastes liked it but just cannot STAND the lead character so have, with great relief, given up on the idea I will ever read the damn thing. otherwise a good book list.

[Girl Detective]

I did a different list a while back that was (I think) the books from Library Thing that were most often unfinished.

http://www.girldetective.net/?p=1226

[kmkat]

Let me just say that I love lists like this, all the bolding and underlining and remembering what I have read.

You and I have read roughly the same number of these, although not all the same ones. My book club is reading Love in the Time of Cholera for July, and we had a lovely chat at our meeting tonight about how much everyone hated reading One Hundred Years of Solitude. (They read that before I joined.) Really makes me look forward to LitToC :-)

[Chris]

How many was that?! I've read around 40 on that list. I think Wuthering Heights has to be way up there in my least favorites. Time Traveler's Wife and 100 Years of Solitude are two of my favorites.

[deb]

Agree - I am a huge Dickens fan; disagree - I am also a huge John Irving fan!! Go figure!!

[Nicole]

I'm really curious to see the stage show of Wicked, too. It looks like fun. And I have to agree with you on Da Vinci Code. I didn't like it either, though I did finish the thing.

(Hehe, did you copy this one from me, then? Looks like some of my parenthetical remarks made it through intact.)