Read into this what you will...

I've had a bit of a tiresome weekend.

Top of the list: the letter from my mortgage company saying they've accidentally been under-charging me for the entire period of my loan thus far. Oops. Then, the central heating died. And to top it off, I got to spend yesterday with a relative who, to all intents and purposes, is indistinguishable from Satan in a dress. But I spent this afternoon reading a really good book, and forgetting all about the real world.

So I was interested to see Wordsmith's post here on the Big Read meme. She hasn't tagged me (clearly, my tag got lost in the post)  but I'm going to join in anyway.

Here's what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) [Bracket] the books you LOVE. (can't be faffed, so they're in red. I also added blue for those I read so you don't have to waste hours of your own life discovering they're a bit crap.)
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

1 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
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
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 Hitchhiker'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's Adventures 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
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
51 MISSING
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
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A. S. 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

My score: 91/100. This suggests I read a lot. I'm not sure what else it says. I don't care much for sci-fi.

But since I love a good row about whether or not Jane Eyre is a complete whinging waste of space (clearly, she is), I'll tag Kim, Linda and Sherrie.

Comments

[Ed Lee]

what do you do to the books you waited for the film for?

[Sally]

Arf.

(I suspect you pretend that you have, of course read the book to avoid being exposed as low-culture-loser.)

[David Child]

Sally, on the books you haven't read yet I'd definitely recommend Confederacy of Dunces (hilarious, tongue-in-cheek examination of hicksville America) and Shadow of the Wind (lots of intertextuality gubbins wrapped up in a cracking story). Unless you've got weeks of your life to spare don't even attempt Les Miserables - go watch the production at least you can sing along to that. Oh and Time Traveller's Wife is definitely one for the Judy Finnigans - if you liked Lovely Bones then you'll like it, if not it'll pass you by in a reading numbness.

The rest sadly I can't comment on - though if we're reading anything into your favourite books that Lolita and Handmaid's Tale rank highly no doubt offers much to the more Freudian thinkers among us.

One to increase your French literature appreciation (aside from Madame Bovary particularly if you love Tess) is Bel Ami by Maupassant - contrast it with Une Vie and you've got a perfect snapshot of French sexual and social mores in mid-1800s.

Happy reading

[Linda]

Oh Jesus. Please can I have two new categories - 1) Books you have started a million times and not got past the first chapter and 2) Books you have seen the film of so will pretend have read them. I will do this later. Oh My God, I'm not sure how far into double figures I'll get - do they have a similar list for 'series of Big Brother I have watched'?

[Linda]

Oh and don't you dare stop talking to me when I bracket the bible.

[Christian]

You didn't like the Secret History? I think you're the first person I've met who didn't love it. 'The Little Friend' on the other hand, was dire.

I've got to disagree with David - I thought 'The Lovely Bones' was hideously dull but loved 'The Time Traveller's Wife'. Also, I'm surprised there's no Murakami on the list - I thought 'After Dark' was pretty decent and readable.

[Kim]

Note: disjointed post coming up:

I thought I was well-read till I saw that you scored 91. My score came in at about 60 or slightly more if I'm allowed to count the Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read them all except Henry VI parts 1 and 2, and The Two Noble Kinsmen!)

It's a bit of a funny list, isn't it? It has The Chronicles of Narnia, and then The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe named separately.

Have you really read ALL of The Bible? I mean, where do you find the time?

Agree with Christian about The Secret History. Unputdownable.

And I've never before met a woman who didn't enjoy Jane Eyre and Little Women!

If you plan on nudging your score one nearer 100, do read Cloud Atlas. It's brilliant.

Will tackle this on the blog if I find the time...

[Sally]

Thanks Kim.

I must admit I read ALL the time, I'm rarely without a couple of books on the go. Also I did a lot of this reading pre-Flea: I did an MA in Eng Lit with subsidiary classes in American Lit at Uni, then did about half of an MA in American Lit a few years later, so covered a lot of the classics then.

Jane Eyre - horrible, whiny character, too annoying for words. Secret History - seemed like a lot of suspense for not enough pay-off, in my book.

Thanks for the recommendations though. And I'm still trying to work out how my choices are Freudian????

[Linda]

Loved Time Traveler's Wife, hated Lovely Bones.

[Kim]

Ain't it always the way that books with a lot of suspense don't have much of a pay-off, though? (We could spend a fun hour thinking of exceptions to this rule.)

I don't get the Freudian remark, either, but then I'm not a Freudian. In fact, one of my favourite nonfiction books of all time, and which I heartily recommend, is called "Why Freud Was Wrong". At least you know what you're getting with a book with a title like that...

Am torn now between putting this list on my own blog and going and doing some work:-)

[Sally]

Oooh, blog, blog, blog!!!

(says she, who is at this moment being paid to train 5 PR executives)

[David Child]

Sally and Kim, it was more of a throwaway comment than a bonafide attempt at psychoanalysis - I promise. Aren't Freudians supposed to read intimate desires into our every move (revealing our childhood/past mistakes) so it seemed they might be able to read into some of the book choices...
Maybe I should triple-check what comments I leave from now on as they seem to get me involved in debates I didn't intend starting!