Fri 21 Apr 2006
I saw this at Mz. GoRightry’s place, and as I love to talk books, here are mine. (UPDATE: I have stolen Bascha’s color notations for favorites, just FYI.) The deal is, you copy the list, bold anything in it that you’ve read, and add four to the end. As an extension of the meme, I am further denoting books in this manner:
- italicised, but not bold = a book I want to read but haven’t yet
- italicised and bold = a book I’m currently reading
bold and struck through= a book I tried to read and have formally abandoned out of disinterest- purple and bold = a book I have read and is a favorite
- purple, bold and italicised = a book I have read and love so much that it’s always “current” reading
Maybe yugen is right, and I need to be a systems librarian.
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 (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
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 (Book 3) - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Book 4) - J.K. Rowling
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter 5) - J.K. Rowling
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Book 1) - J.K. Rowling
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Book 2) - J.K. Rowling
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender’s Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
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
The Unberable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera
Hey Nostradamus! - Douglas Coupland
The Nature of Blood - Caryl Phillips
Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules - Ed. David Sedaris
The Last Continent - Terry Pratchett
The Book of Skulls - Robert Silverberg
The Beekeeper’s Apprentice - Laurie R. King
Persepolis 2 - Marjane Satrapi
My four additions:
The Sound & The Fury - William Faulkner
A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami
The Bridge of Birds - Barry Hughart
Foundation - Isaac Asimov
April 22nd, 2006 at 8:34 am
I’m surprised you couldn’t make it through Catch-22. Luckily all the books I’ve had to just put down were not on this list. Granted, the unfinished list is small (less than 5?).
I’d like to see a list of things people have read and would not recommend to people, and why. Most people I know who love to read have ingested a fair amount of garbage in their day. Do we keep going back, or are we more discerning as we get older?
April 22nd, 2006 at 3:00 pm
Catch-22 was assigned to me in high school as an individual-reading kind of thing, and it was a rough year and rather than just feeling the bitter irony I told her that it was too depressing. I think Horse Shoe was too empty of gallows humor at that point for it to really hit me right.
As a side note, my teacher’s suggested replacement was The Grapes of Wrath. I wonder now just how much she hated me.
As to do we keep going back, I have gotten less discerning as I age. I think this is in part because I can become more the gourmand than when I was a kid and had my dad riding my ass to mow the lawn, you know?
April 23rd, 2006 at 12:29 pm
Great list, mirrors a great deal of my list. Being a graduate student right now, the list will grow, not shrink until graduation.
April 25th, 2006 at 6:54 pm
[...] Inspired by Bascha, I have updated my book meme entry to include books I loved and books I love so much I’m pretty much always reading them or about to read them. [...]