15w1d: Book List

I snagged this from Poppy's blog.

"Here's how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE
4) Reprint this list in your blog.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below."

Sadly, I used to be of voracious reader, but work has taken over my life for years now, and I rarely read books anymore. I spend too much damn time on the internet: either infertility stufff, and now pregnancy stuff, and of course my daily fix of New York Times, LA Times, San Diego Union, and CNN... Besides that I read magazines and medical journals, pretty much. Besides, I go into bookstores and feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of books, and too afraid to buy something for fear that I'll read a few pages and decide that I don't want to finish it. For that reason, I think I'd be better off going to the library. What I really like is for someone to tell me, "Hey, you should read this; you'd really like it."

I don't feel like putting the ones I intend to read in italics, so I'm not going to! Don't wanna see this list in 5 years and feel like a failure!

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - no, but I have read The Hobbit (didn't care for it much, and that's why I never read the rest.) Ironically, my middle name is a character in the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, but I have never read the books...or seen the movies!
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - no, and I haven't seen the movies, either. I guess I'm just not a fan of the fantasy genre.
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - parts of it... for a college class, actually.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (I have to admit, I've never even heard of it).
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare- some of them, certainly not all.
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (I don't actually remember anything about it.)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks (Never heard of this one, either.)
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (??? I am starting to feel illiterate.)
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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh (Again, ???)
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
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I quit somewhere along the way.)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - (In fact, I have read everything and own everything by Jane Austen, including her short stories.)
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - saw (& really enjoyed) the movie, and now not motivated to read the book
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - read the book, and now not motivated to watch the movie.
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Uh... unless there's some fancy adult version that I'm not aware of...
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - Read first chapter and got distracted thereafter.
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - Saw movie, and now not motivated to read the book.
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
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 Dickens
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
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 - Alexandre 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 - most of it, but not every last bit.
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - I think I liked The Little Princess even more!
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
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 (???)
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
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
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (???)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection (???)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
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 (???)
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - Yes, in junior high, but I think it was an "abridged" version (still several hundred pages, though), so I won't count it.

Bedtime; I guess I'll have to update on pregnancy stuff later!