By the simplest gauge, I have already had a handful of posts devoted to the tried subject of British weather, so I can hardly expound on it any more without truly approximating a broken gramophone record. Yet, that particular topic remains – as it would be in any civilized discourse – the only one that can inexhaustibly feed a conversation. For instance, the glorious week and a half of sun and warmth has now seemingly been replaced with the more customary drizzle and chill…
Oops, here I go again. Sorry!
Instead, let me heap a new meme thingie on you, courtesy of my friend Jason, who himself picked it up elsewhere.
There is a list of books. The original rules were fairly simple: Bold the ones you’ve read on your own, underline the ones you’ve read for school, italicize the ones you’ve started but not finished. Prior to Jason, someone added a rule of striking through (like this) books that you have no interest in reading, and putting an * next to the books that you own and intend to read. Jason added another twist of putting a + next to any book that he would like to read one day.
I’m going back to basics. Since I cannot think of any book in my library that I have not read, I’ll do away with asterisks. Adopting a “never say never” stance, I am going to eschew strike-throughs. There is a number of books that I’d like to read – or re-read – one day, but that day is at least twenty years away, so no plus signs. You will not find italics, either, since I always finish what I start.
I will add something of my own to the proceedings, however. A # sign will be used for any book whose title I did not readily recognize and had to Google.
Make your own inferences about every unadorned and uncommented-upon tome on this list.
Let’s see:
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell #
- Anna Karenina
very few people of my background would not know what this story is about, but I never read it
- Crime and Punishment
I even played a prosecutor at a mock trial for Raskolnikov
- Catch-22
I know that the idiom originates with the book
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi: A Novel #
- The Name of the Rose
- Don Quixote
I think I was too young when I read it; I want to try again one day
- Moby Dick
it never appealed to me as a widely-accepted classic, for some reason
- Ulysses
- Madame Bovary
- The Odyssey
Ancient Greek mythology has always been a fascinating subject for me, and I know the particulars of Odysseus’s travels quite well, but I’ve never read Homer’s work
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Eyre
- A Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies #
- War and Peace
I would have read it even if it were not required in school
- Vanity Fair
- The Time Traveler’s Wife #
- The Iliad
unlike The Odyssey, this Homer’s work was part of my English curriculum in college
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin #
- The Kite Runner
I only recognize it because of the recent movie title…
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Great Expectations
- American Gods
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius #
- Atlas Shrugged #
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books #
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Middlesex #
- Quicksilver #
- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
Becky read it and informed me that she liked the stage version better
- The Canterbury Tales
- The Historian: A Novel #
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
- Love in the Time of Cholera #
- Brave New World #
- The Fountainhead #
- Foucault’s Pendulum
- Middlemarch #
- Frankenstein
- The Count of Monte Cristo
I am not sure if there is a work by Dumas that I have not read prior to turning 13 or so
- Dracula
- A Clockwork Orange
- Anansi Boys #
- The Once and Future King #
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel #
- 1984
only a few years ago, as it happens…
- Angels & Demons
and liked it better than the Da Vinci Code
- The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
- The Satanic Verses
- Sense and Sensibility
- The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Mansfield Park #
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
- To the Lighthouse #
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Oliver Twist
- Gulliver’s Travels
- Les Misérables
close to the top of my list for revisiting one day
- The Corrections #
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay #
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time #
- Dune
- The Prince #
- The Sound and the Fury #
- Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
- The God of Small Things #
- A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present #
- Cryptonomicon
- Neverwhere #
- A Confederacy of Dunces #
- A Short History of Nearly Everything #
- Dubliners #
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being
- Beloved
- Slaughterhouse-Five
- The Scarlet Letter
- Eats, Shoots & Leaves #
- The Mists of Avalon
- Oryx and Crake: a novel #
- Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed #
- Cloud Atlas #
- The Confusion #
- Lolita
- Persuasion #
- Northanger Abbey #
- The Catcher in the Rye
- On the Road #
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
another one due for a re-read eventually
- Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values #
- The Aeneid
- Watership Down #
- Gravity’s Rainbow #
- The Hobbit
I can’t say that this is one of my favorite fantasy books, though
- In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences #
- White Teeth #
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield
- The Three Musketeers
my first adult book; I must have been six when I read it for the first time
Out of 105 books, only 16 read. 44 others I do not immediately recognize. That leaves 45 books that I know of but never read. Interestingly, there are only a handful of them that I would ideally like to have read to justify my self-perception of a well-read person. Coupled with some weird selections – and by the way, all six of Jane Austen’s novels?!?!, – it gives me a perfect excuse to blame my dismal results on the warped compilation. It’s either that – or eternal shame.
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