Jackelopette's Blog

According to the Interwubs Meme Generator, and unconfirmed by BBC.co.uk … the BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total and put it in the title.

I added a (-) to the ones I would not willingly read again. Sometimes once is more than enough.

I believe Villanova’s English department is responsible for perpetrating a good half of my list onto my poor, pathetic mind.

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 (X)
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman (X+)
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 (* and a partial X+ … I’m slowly working on it!)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier (X)
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (X)
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger (X)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger (X+)
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot ( )
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (X)
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (X+)
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens (-)
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy (*)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (X+)
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh (*)
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (X)
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck (X)
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (X+ , especially the all-in-one Annotated copy from my dad)
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (X)
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy (*)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens (-)
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (X+)
34 Emma – Jane Austen (X)
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen (X)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis (X … I cry duplicate to #33!)
37. Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini (*)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres (*)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (X+)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne (X)
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell (X)
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown (X-)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (*)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White – (*)
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery (X+ … plus the series)
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 (X -)
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel (X+)
52 Dune – Frank Herbert (X)
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons ( )
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen (X)
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth ( )
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon ( )
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (X-)
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 (X)
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck (X)
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov ( )
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt ( )
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold (*)
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (X -)
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac (*)
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy ( )
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding (X – … upon further reading)
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (*)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson ( )
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (X)
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath (*)
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome ( )
78 Germinal – Emile Zola ( )
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray (*)
80 Possession – AS Byatt (X)
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 (X -)
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 (partial X)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad (X -)
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (X+)
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks ( )
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams (X+)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Toole (X -)
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas (X -)
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (X+ … though I call duplicate to #14!)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl (X)
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo (X)

OK, OK, so I’m an incorrigible geek with a penchant for literary self-punishment. Shaddup.

Posted in Briefs, Geekery, Quotes

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

I Remember When

You hold the answer deep within your own mind
The moon shook and curled up like gentle fire
Deck the halls with boughs of holly
Feel it break your bones Mr. Jones

Your cell phone, your wallet, your time, your ideas
Tale as old as time
I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together
In a forest of stone underneath the corporate canopy

Crocodile on my feet
I was afraid you’d hit me if I’d spoken up
Bye bye, love.

Pale September, I wore the time like a dress that year
For all those girls, who speak contradiction
And it came to pass, all that seemed wrong
was now right
In the white room with black curtains near the station.

Just got back from Paris, France
Well, I know, I miss more than hit
Cupid hath pulled back his sweethearts bow
A starry destination is where we we’re going
Let me know that I’ve done wrong.

Posted in Briefs, Geekery, Quotes