Feb 28, 2009 16:11
- Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
No, but my sister loves it and I'm thinking of giving it a try, just to say I've done it.
- The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
Yes, of course. No self-respecting nerd hasn't.
- Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
No, but if she's anything like her sister, I don't ever want to.
- Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
Yes.
- To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
Yes; I even helped a friend record Atticus' closing statements for a project in middle school.
- The Bible
Not entirely, though I still intend to.
- Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Yes, and I hated every minute of it. I swear, I read the same page at least five times because I kept falling asleep before I got to the end of it.
- Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
Yes, it's a favorite.
- His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
No, but my sister has loaned it to me.
- Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Yes, and it's painfully obvious Dickens was paid by the word.
- Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
No.
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
I read Return of the Native, and it was unbelievably tedious.
- Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
Yes, and my dad lived it.
- Partial Works of Shakespeare
Huh? I've read some of them, of course, but I don't know what this means.
- Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
Never even heard of it.
- The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
My parents read it to me as a child (they fought over who got to read it when), and I've read it myself.
- Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
Never even heard of it.
- Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
Alas, no.
- The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
I describe it as "beautifully sad." A very good book.
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
Never heard of this one, either.
- Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
I have not.
- The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
You'd think I would love this book, since it's about The Gilded Age of jazz and extravagance, but no. I found it tiresome, but I had to read it. I'm thinking about giving this one another shot.
- Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Nope.
- War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
"Happy New Year, Charlie Brown!" so engrained it in my head that this book was torture that I never even thought of trying to read it.
- The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
Read it. Read the whole series. Own the whole series. Adams is a classic British wit.
- Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
Nope.
- Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I found it more readable than most of the stuff we did in AP English, but it was still beyond me as a high school senior. I've got this grand idea of reading all these "classic" works now that I've got a better appreciation of literature, and see if I actually like them now.
- Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Read "Of Mice and Men," but not this one.
- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
Alas! I have not.
- The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
I saw the Disney cartoon, but never read the book.
- Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Nope.
- David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
Nope.
- Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
Read them and own them in their original order, the order the movies are being made in.
- Emma - Jane Austen
Nope.
- Persuasion - Jane Austen
Why are these two next to each other and all the others aren't? And no.
- The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Seriously? This is a separate entry?
- The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
Nope.
- Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
Nope.
- Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Nope.
- Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
Read this one and The Tao of Pooh.
- Animal Farm - George Orwell
Orwell should be shot for writing Animal Farm, but he should be resurrected for writing 1984. Middle school English dissected this one so much that any enjoyment was taken right out of it.
- The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
Nope. I hear it's terribly mediocre.
- One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
No.
- A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
I've never heard of this one, either.
- The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
Nor this one.
- Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
Nope.
- Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
Hardy again? Once was enough.
- The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
Haven't heard of this one, either.
- Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Somehow, I missed this one.
- Atonement - Ian McEwan
It was a chick flick, so I'm assuming I should continue not reading this one.
- Life of Pi - Yann Martel
My sister's read it, and she says it has something to do with being stuck on a raft with a tiger.
- Dune - Frank Herbert
I think the only reason I could handle this was because I'd seen both the David Lynch and the Sci-Fi Channel versions of the movie, so I knew the basic plot and wasn't thrown by all the weird stuff. Ha-ha, terrible pun.
- Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
Another I've never heard of.
- Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Another Austen?
- A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
Nope.
- The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
Nor this.
- A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
Pretty sure I haven't read it.
- Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
A classic of science fiction. This one and 1984 sometimes get a little mixed up in my head, from when I went on a classic sci-fi kick, but both are definitely worth reading repeatedly.
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
A sad, unique book that I enjoyed.
- Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Again: chick flick, so I should skip it.
- Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
"Tell me 'bout the rabbits, George." It took me until high school to understand why that one big, dumb cat was always saying that in Looney Tunes cartoons.
- Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
I have not.
- The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Must've been real secret, since I never heard of it.
- The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Wow, I've never heard of a surprising amount of these books.
- Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
I think so.
- On The Road - Jack Kerouac
Another one I somehow missed.
- Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy cannot possibly be this good that he's on here like six times.
- Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
Boring chick flick, so I'll skip the book.
- Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
I've got The Satanic Verses around here somewhere. Another loaner from my sister.
- Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Call me terminally bored by this book.
- Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
...no? All those Dickens stories run together.
- Dracula - Bram Stoker
I don't think so. I'm pretty sure I read Frankenstein, though.
- The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
I think I might have. Or I saw the movie twenty times because my sister loved it.
- Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
I'm not sure I'd call this his best one, because I've read most of Bryson's travel books, but it's definitely enjoyable. Bryson is hilarious.
- Ulysses - James Joyce
I couldn't finish Portrait of the Artist as an Incredibly Boring, Pretentious Jerk Young Man, and that's supposed to be his "most accessible" book. So, no.
- The Inferno - Dante
I think I did?
- Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
Again, never heard of it.
- Germinal - Emile Zola
Merciful God, this was a tedious book.
- Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
So it's a book and a magazine? Is it also a floor wax and a dessert topping?
- Possession - AS Byatt
No.
- A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
Has anyone who's attended college not read this one?
- Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
No.
- The Color Purple - Alice Walker
No.
- The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
No.
- Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Also no.
- A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
Also no.
- Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
But of course.
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
My mom suggested I read it; it was OK.
- Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
I'm ashamed to say I haven't.
- The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
Another I haven't heard of.
- Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
I helped teach this book in AP English. While we were talking about it to the class, I fell asleep sitting in a chair. I can blame it partially on the heavy-duty medicines I was on at the time, but man this was tedious.
- The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
Nope.
- The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
Wow, this is a lot of books I've never heard of.
- Watership Down - Richard Adams
I'm ashamed to say I haven't.
- A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
No, but [clever joke about Congress].
- A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
Also not heard of this one.
- The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
I think so...?
- Hamlet - William Shakespeare
One of these days, I also mean to read Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.
- Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
I haven't, but I did read James and the Giant Peach
- Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Nope, but I did see the South Park movie.
nonsense,
post-whoring,
meme-sheepage