"The Great Read"

[soderbergh]

From a friend of mine "The Great Read is apparently all scandalized that most Canadians have only read six of these books." I, like her, don't really understand why these books are the ones they've chosen. I hardly think that reading the daVinci code makes you a reader -- aren't most serious readers too embarrassed to read that? Plus, half of these

Comments

cont'd

[dustyasymptotes]

53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth x
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon *
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens * but The Dickens! What with all the Dickens. I actually don't want to pick on A Tale of Two Cities because it's probably (along with Oliver Twist) the Dickens I have the most sympathy for. Never have I experienced so much trudging for so little pay off as generalized in the collective works of one author.
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley x + Need to read more Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon x +
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez x -_-
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck x * + but also -_- oh lennie oh george
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
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy * Of all the *s this one's probably the most heartfelt.
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie # * sure why not
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce Me too, Alex, on all 3 counts.
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome x + *
78 Germinal - Emile Zola *
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt x + what a great book Byatt OVER Drabble. Aca-sibling-feuds are the best!
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell x + swooooon
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 x + I've read every Rohinton Mistry and everyone I've talked to so far seems to like their best the most. this one was my first. (I think I've liked each subsequent one less - in reading order)
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White x + *
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom -_- ok I break the grimace symbol rule here
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad x + with reservations. teach the controversy!
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks * maaaybe.
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x +
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 x
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x + I popped over to his List of Works on wikipedia and the Children's books I haven't read yet are: The Gremlins, The Vicar of Nibbleswicke, The Minpins, and The Giraffe the Pelly and Me. I also missed his cookbook, most of his adult fiction/non fiction/other except for Skin and Other Stories, The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and Six More, and a bunch of autobiographies. More prolific than I thought.
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

total x: 43

Re: cont'd

[soderbergh]

But I love Great Expectations! I think I read the Giraffe the Pelly and Me though I'm missing all the same ones as you are (and possibly a few more: re: Roald Dahl -- e.g. I never bothered with James and the Giant Peach as like a conscious choice).

There's a severe absence of Virginia Woolf on this list.

Also, I c/p'ed from a friend of mine so...woops! I forgot to change the Three Musketeers listing; I have not read any Dumas because I'm convinced I should read it in the original French, which I'm just so not up to doing yet.

Thanks for agreeing with me about Joyce.
Re: Rohinton Mistry: you liked the "first" one you read best? and then the later ones less and less? His wife worked at my high school. We didn't get along swell though because she didn't like my shoes.

How come you haven't read any Austen?!?!?!

Do you love the Laurence boy?

Re: cont'd

[soderbergh]

PS have you heard the newest Devendra Banhart album? "Shabop Shalom" has got to be my new favourite song.

Also, I'm spreading the Devendra Banhart love. I feel like I've been doing a lot of spreading of the "things Jiayi loves and then spread to me and that I must now spread to the world" stuff lately.