Literature

[elusivek]

Snagged this offhandshakedrugs  ; glad to hear I'm not totally ignorant on literature... hey, I was an Arts student in High School!!!


The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions:
Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.


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) - I have to admit it's an ongoing thing... 
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (x)
8 1984 - George Orwell - ()
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (x)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens ( )
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 ( )
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier (x)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien ( )
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk ( )
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - (x) totally hated this book though...
19 The Time Traveller’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 Hitchhiker’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 (x)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (x)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen ( )
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X) isn't this part of Chronicles of Narnia?
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 ( )
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 Meany - John Irving ( )
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins ( )
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (x)
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 ( )
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel ( )
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-time - Mark Haddon ( )
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez ( )
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck ( )
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (x) gave me a lot of chills..... ugh...
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 ( )
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie ( )
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (x) it took me ages to finish this... 
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 ( )
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 () Such a good movie, too!
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 (x)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton ( )
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad ( )
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (x) i don't get it... sorry to say that...
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 (x)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (x)
 
Ha! 28 books out of the list! Sadly, most of the books I read above were done during my primary and high school days... (haven't been doing much reading lately...)

I was hoping the list would include more classics like Silas Marner and Flowers for Mrs. Harris but then apparently there's some modern work in it too. (I believe I've read way more classics due to school.... wakakaka)

Sad thing we never did much of Shakespeare at school, and whatever that we did were just with abridged versions of books. hm..... =/ Perhaps now I would know how to appreciate the humour of Midsummer Night's Dream?

Comments

[kurikuribebi]

I haven't read many of these but I feel good either way. I've heard of the majority of them, have had them in my posession, but because they weren't interesting, I didn't read them. In all honesty, this list of 100 sucks XD

[gold-dragontsu.livejournal.com]

Well, here's my list. I'm admittedly not well read, though only three of these were read for school (1984, Catcher in the Rye, and Hamlet). I was actually surprised I had read more than the assumed average of six. I'm not sure what you mean about classics though. I'd say most of these are classics! The two books you mentioned I've never even heard of...

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
6 The Bible - Also ongoing for me...
8 1984 - George Orwell
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - I love this book! What do you hate about it?
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Yes, it is part of the Chronicles of Narnia...
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - And this is part of Shakespeare's complete works... Duh... ANYTHING by Shakespeare would be part of Shakespeare's complete works if you think about it. ;)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl

[tendre.livejournal.com]

I agree with kurikuribebi... This list plain sucks. :b There are a couple of that I thoroughly enjoyed, but otherwise it brings me back to high school and how I hated everything we read. x3

I've only read 14 so far, but there are 17 on this list that I am (possibly) interested in.

My book list is here, by the way: http://books.livingsocial.com/people/1700796197

I love to read. :3

[notte0.livejournal.com]

i also have a lot of books in my possession (but I never read them in the end)... I'm trying to stop myself from buying books by making myself read ALL the books on my shelf first... perhaps I will cease to buy books from now on!????

[notte0.livejournal.com]

hm... well,... I high doubt those more recent works like Harry Potter is a classic... but perhaps it's my concept of what a classic is. (I DISAGREE that books like Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies are classics either)

Catcher in the Rye was very difficult to read. The cursing and the accents distracted me too much. Perhaps this is what made the book famous or a classic, but really, i couldn't handle that book...

I mean, these may be popular and required school texts... but to me, these are not classics!!! *wails* [please note I have alot of wrong concepts on the real world :P]

hm... funny thing about Shakespeare is, although I haven't read all of his works, I know more or less what each is about... the works I've actually read include Merchant of Venice and Midsummer Night's Dream. The others, never touched or seen a book of.

The Bible is an interesting topic for me. I think I've read Genesis for way too many times (my attempt in "reading the Biible from cover to cover"). Interesting how Mark John Matthew and Luke were the main books studied in Primary school though. And then it's the Acts and 1 John for Secondary/High school curriculum.

[notte0.livejournal.com]

haha, I'm also not too fond of this list, I think there's quite some modern titles there and in my eyes they're not so classic.

hm... strange, I found that some of my favourite books are high school literature. Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights were simply breathtaking!

:D

[tendre.livejournal.com]

Yes, I was actually surprised to see things like Harry Potter. I mean, I'm sure it's great and all, considering how large the series is, but it's definitely no classic yet!

Sadly, we never read any of the good books in high school. I want to read Pride and Prejudice and Wuthering Heights - the only one I enjoyed in HS was 1984. Otherwise we only read The Grapes of Wrath, To Kill a Mockingbird, and other incredibly boring books that conk you out during class. ;3

[kurikuribebi]

There was once a building filled with books that we did not need to purchase. It was called a library..... XD

[gold-dragontsu.livejournal.com]

I guess there's a fine line between when something becomes a classic. Can something that's less than a century old really be called a classic? Maybe that's what you are getting at... I dunno. Shakespeare should probably be considered classic. Harry Potter is fad literature with the potential of becoming classic literature one day. I would call the Narnian Chronicles classic before the Harry Potter books, but I'm not sure if the former is even established enough to be called "classic" yet. I'd definitely say it's on its way, though.

Perhaps this is what made the book famous or a classic, but really, i couldn't handle that book...

I don't think the language by itself is what made it classic. Rather, the sophisticated detail into which the adolescent mind is examined through Holden is amazing, especially for its realism. I would say that the tumultuous stage between childhood and adulthood is not something that is dealt with in literature frequently... I also don't know how many novels can effectively go into so much depth when covering such a short time span.

*chuckles* Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm surprised that you say that swearing bothers you...

The others, never touched or seen a book of.

If you ever consider more Shakespeare, I recommend Two Gentlemen of Verona and Much Ado About Nothing. We read those two in my Composition II course in college, and I thought both were very good. We had an excellent teacher, though, who was very knowledgeable with Shakespeare, and I think that really helped... We read at least three of his plays in High School and I didn't get nearly as much out of them then...

I heard a recommendation once that the bible should be read backwards when trying to read it the first time. Personally, I haven't gotten through Leviticus. Genesis and Exodus were fairly easy for me since they are more story oriented. I get caught up with the details of the laws in Leviticus... Really, I should give it another try... Maybe this Lent... but there's so many things I'm trying to do. :S I've started reading the General Instruction of the Liturgy of the Hours (http://www.catholicliturgy.com/index.cfm/FuseAction/DocumentContents/Index/2/SubIndex/39/DocumentIndex/2)... My hope is to get a better understanding of how they work for whenever I acquire my own copy.

Hehe, maybe you could make it a Lenten goal to read Habakkuk (http://www.usccb.org/nab/bible/habakkuk/intro.htm)... I think you could do it! ;)

[notte0.livejournal.com]

*chuckles* Well, don't take this the wrong way, but I'm surprised that you say that swearing bothers you...

I know I curse sometimes too, but in that book it was like... worse than cursing or swearing or cussing, whatever the word. and the stops, and the halts... I mean, I digress and go off tangent at times too, but in that book, that guy was totally hopeless...

*screws up face because of bad memory reading all that* guh....

I could try... but to make sure I did not search for the wrong thing, is this the right one? http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=42&chapter=1&version=31

[gold-dragontsu.livejournal.com]

I mean, I digress and go off tangent at times too, but in that book, that guy was totally hopeless...

That's the genius of it, though... :} For all of the stuff Holden went through in that ~48 hour period, he ended up going everywhere except somewhere. Anyway, sorry for bringing it up, though, since it is a bad memory...

That is the correct book. However, NIV is not a Catholic translation of the bible I don't believe. I'm not sure if you are concerned about that sort of thing or not. If you go to the link from my previous post and click the "Next Chapter" link below the introductory text, it'll take you into it. The link I posted is NAB (New American Bible) which is a Catholic translation, though not without controversy apparently (more here (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_American_Bible)). If you want something really traditional, you could try this (http://www.newadvent.org/bible/hab000.htm). :}