Monday, February 23, 2009

A Reading List. How Many Have You Read?

Here's a list that's making the rounds on facebook-It's the BBC reading list. The BBC apparently believes that most people will have read only 6 of the hundred from this list. I always wonder who makes up lists such as these, and how certain books end up on it. Why the Da Vinci Code. Horrible book, that. Or what about two seperate entries for 'The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe' and another one for the Chronicles of Narnia. That's 6 extra books counted as one, while one of the Chronicles books is counted as 1 entry. I think maybe they didn't read these either! Any way, you can Check to see how many you've read. Are there any on the list you liked? You can copy and past this into a word document if you like and do a tally. Put an X by the ones you've read and a + by those you loved.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x
6 The Bible x
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger /
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
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 x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens x
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis x
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini x
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden /
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
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 x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x
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 Dickensx
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x
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 - Ale andre 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 x
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x
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 x
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 x
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 x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-dE upery
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 x
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x

I've read 31 on this list, unless you count a few of the ones that I've started and absolutely hated and wouldn't finish (like the DaVinici Code) then I have more like 40. But out of those 31 I have absolute loved at least half. I will put Maragaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale and Douglas Adams Hitchhiker's guide on my 'to read' list. How about you?

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

The Rope Walk

I finally finished "The Rope Walk" by Carrie Brown. It's this year's ALL IOWA READS choice. It ended up being a very satisfying book and I'm really glad I finished it. But let me tell you, it took nearly 2 months for me to get to the end of the book. I was bogged down at the beginning by the overwhelming amount of description that Brown used in the form of similes and metaphors. That put me off a bit. I would be interested to see if her other book is similar in that regard.
The story centers around a ten year old girl, a young mixed race boy who is staying with the family through an unusual set of circumstances, and a man dying of Aids. The book deals with the dynamics between the three unlikely characters. We see the world as young Alice sees it. And she begins to discover that the world isn't always a very nice place, that ugliness can exsist even in the middle of very beautiful places. The events of the story take place over one summer and it is remeniscent of many childhood summers. The story is about friendship, self realization, and a growing awareness of self in the world. It surely wasn't my usual murder mystery but I enjoyed it nonetheless. I would recommend this read!