Black Dog Blog

Another book meme. Is it just me or do these keep morphing?; I'm sure I see some here that I haven't on previous ones. Also, this meme is nothing to do with the BBC, whatever you've read.

Mark off the books you've read with an X.

1 Pride and Prejudice X [Don't believe the haters. It's good. If you smile at the first few lines, it's a good indication that you'll like it. I find comedies of manners so darkly funny. My late kitten was nicknamed Mr. Arsey. Anyhow, what I really want to read next is Pride and Prejudice With Zombies.]
2 The Lord of the Rings X [You've got to read LotR For Great Heritage if you're a fant writer. No desire to read it again, though, and I didn't see the films.]
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X [read for school, it's worth reading]
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X [read for school, it's very good]
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X [first book is stand-out fabulous]
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott x [NOT worth reading, can't remember for sure if I finished it]
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller [I tried twice.]
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier X [I think so... or heard an audio book. Quite good]
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X [This is a bit closer to a story than a MY WORLDBUILDING, LET ME SHOW YOU IT extravaganza.]
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X [Charming. I really liked it]
19 The Time Traveler'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 Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice's Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X [let me correct the title for you, meme]
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X [I spent most of my early childhood as either the Water Rat or Thomas the Tank Engine]

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X
34 Emma – Jane Austen [seen enough adaptations not to bother; Mr Thrice is too moralistic]
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X [This is like one point for the famous one, another for all the rest, right? cf #33]
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 [Milne's poetry should be required reading - preferably aloud - for kiddies]

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X [read for school, very good, and what got me to read Nineteen Eighty-Four off my own bat]
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown X [Enjoyed imagining it was all true, guessed the plot in advance, found the film boring]
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel García Márquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
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 X [it was the OTHER English Literature class's set book and I'd finished ours. I agree with the writer and Almost Witty here; I find it all too plausible. Lost its charm for me near the end when it went stupid and religious]
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X [Ignore the weird multifaith beginning, which has no bearing on anything. I enjoyed this. It's weird]
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X [Glad I read it, if just to have read it. Want a pet Maker.]
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons X [Brill! Hilarious!]
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 X [It lost me towards the end when the Noble Savage went weird. Fun thinking through the ethical whatsits of the setting, which is a respectable attempt at a theoretically defensible sci-fi utopia]
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon X [Two dogs, Sherlock Holmes, Asperger's syndrome, what more do you need? Genius book, perfect insight into our alien thoughts.]
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X [Nothing more explicit than a pocket money hand job happens on-camera in this. The narrating character's 'nymphet' thesis was ever so slightly disturbing, which was good. I mean, who wants to identify fully with a paedo protag?]
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas [I really should.]
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary – Helen Fielding X [I was glad I read this too; felt like an insight into a modern thirtysomething woman's mind, and funny.]
69 Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens [Think I've only read digests or so. Can't be bothered, really.]
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X [You've no business being a vampire fan if you don't go back to the source. Epistolary novels are fun, as is realising how much easier today's writing is on the attention span.]
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X [Pretty good children's reading. Dickon = Mary Sue.]
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome [Liked the TV adaptation but could make no headway into the book after an extended section on tacking made me lose interest. But, well, I have never forgotten what tacking is...]
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X [Dickens is slow going, but this is short.]
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 [Pretty good children's reading, goes well with fellow pig-lover Dick King-Smith]
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X [If you've never read this, come over to my place and my Brett box set, let me show you it.]
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton [Or a collection called The Folk of the Faraway Tree, which is close enough for me. Not worth reading.]

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery X [The fox part I got. Good work on the fox. The rest, sorry.]
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks [I can't bring myself to read his non-M works, for whatever reason. Actually, now I think of it, the reason is A Song of Stone. Incest NO.]
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 X [You can't read The Phoenix Guards and not pay respects to its source.]
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X [A library lunch hour I'm, on balance, glad I spent. You've gotta, haven't you? I had no particular opinion on the text.]
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo