Showing posts with label books. Show all posts
Showing posts with label books. Show all posts

Monday, January 25, 2010

Well Read?

Everyone keeps asking me whether I have/want one of those electronic book readers like the Kindle or Sony reader because I'm always reading something and can spend hours in the bookstore but I have absolutely no desire for one of those electronic things. I love getting a new book, cracking the spine and turning the pages the old fashion way. Would you want an electronic book reader?

The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions: Copy this list and bold or put an ‘X’ after those you have read and then leave a link in the comments.

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
6 The Bible X
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
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 X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger X
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot X*
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
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma-Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hossein X
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 X
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving X
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
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel X
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
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 – Mark Haddon X
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 X
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac X
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X
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 X

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
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
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

*never finished

I am an avid reader so I thought I would do better than 39 out of the 100. It's more than the 6 average but not as good as I expected. Some of these books I have absolutely no interest in reading and others I'm going to make a special trip to the bookstore to find out what I've been missing. I'm always looking for a good book to sink my teeth into.

I'm surprised a couple of my favorites didn't make the list so I thought I would add a few more bonus books of my own:

101 Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand X
102 The Book Thief - Markus Zusak X
103 East of Eden - John Steinbeck X
104 Crimson Petal and the White - Michael Faber X


You can check out my complete bookshelf here.

How many of the 100 books have you read? More than 6? Did your favorite book make the list?

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Eat Pray Love

As you can see from my Shelfari bookshelf, I'm an avid reader of everything from the classics, to fiction, to non-fiction, to trashy fluff so if you have any book recommendations let me know; I'm always looking for a good one to devour. Some days sticking my nose in a book and plugging into my MP3 player are the only things that get me through the daily commute into the city on the T (MBTA/Orange Line) .


I recently read the hyped autobiography Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. I usually don't like reading what everyone else is raving about because I'm often disappointed when it doesn't live up to the glowing reviews but I actually liked this one. I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised by honest account of this woman's determination to find herself and the life she knew she was meant to have. At times I thought she was a bit whiny but I think I was just jealous because I couldn't afford to take a year off from my life and find myself. Wouldn't that be nice, huh?


There was a great passage about Karma that really hit home with me. Gilbert writes:
"The karmic philosophy appeals to me on a metaphorical level because even
in one lifetime it's obvious how often we must repeat our sames mistakes,
banging our heads against the same old addictions and compulsions, generating
the same old miserable and often catastrophic consequences, until we can finally
stop and fix it. This is the supreme lesson of karma (and also of Western
psychology, by the way) - take care of the problems now, or else you'll just
have to suffer again later when you screw everything up the next time. And that
repetition of suffering - that's hell."

I've been living that hell by repeatedly making the same mistakes. I continue to struggle but I'm determined to fix it - I don't want to be fat in my next life too :)