1001 books to read before I .......what?



A couple of those are actually on the list!


Thanks to Jarmara I have encountered the list of 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die*. It's been an interesting experience, not least because of the whole concept of reading 1001 books.

You do the sums. Assume that you read a book a month. (Yeah, yeah, I know, you read a lot more than that don't you, but bear with me.) 1001 months is a little over 83 years. So assume you read the first one when you're seven. The Little Prince (Saint-Exupery) is on the list and so is The Hobbit so it's not unreasonable to start then. Though you probably wouldn't go straight from that to War and Peace. That will make you 90 when you finish. The average age-at-death in my family is somewhere around 73. Are you telling me that if I start reading the rest of the list I will somehow live long enough to read them?

Because even at one a week it's still going to take nearly 20 years. Actually, I've already read 100 of them (I can't believe that it came out at exactly 100 either!) so that would still need 17 years and 17 weeks to finish the list. Scarily, that would make me just about the right age to die in line with my family.......

So if it's all the same to you, I'm going to read what I want, when I want and not bother with any silly lists!

*********

* That link will take you to someone's blog because the original list is in a book that you first have to BUY! It's got an introduction by Peter Akroyd, which might explain why several of his titles are included.

Reading the classics

Some time ago I made a pledge to read more classics this year. I've not been reading as much of anything as I'd like to but I have managed to get a few things onto my list. I've just finished The Great Gatsby, which is something I've intended to read for a while. Interesting storyline and the setting on Long Island was fascinating because I'd just finished reading a modern book called Murder Most Frothy (Cleo Coyle), which is set in almost the same place.

I have also chalked up a Dickens short book called A Message from the Sea, which was interesting, if only for the odd dialect that took a bit of translating. It came with my e-reader.

The orignal idea was to get through 12 classics this year, but I can't see that happening unless I try harder. I've got lots of other things I want to get through as well! I'm currently reading Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey, which is shaping up very well.

How many?

The BBC 'most people have only read six books' thing has reared its ugly head again. I think it's been around for years but it's still an interesting exercise. Apparently, surveys show that most people have read only six of the list below. 
(Bold means I've read it. Italics means I started it and gave up. There are also comments.)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling  (I read the first four then she sold out)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (I really should, shouldn't I)
6 The Bible (What? All of it?)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (My O Level book)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
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 
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (And I know why people -allegedly - go out and kill afterwards. I really wanted to kill Holden Caulfield!)
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 (It's on my list. It's on my E-reader!)
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
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (lots of times - one of my favourites)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Yes, all of them)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe  (See no. 33)
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 (I LOVE Pooh!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Not his best. Angels and Demons is better)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (And it felt like it!)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving (Give him back! One of the best books ever)
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 (Hated it)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding50 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
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  (Very clever book)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (Because I hated 100 years... see 43)
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 (It's nonsense!)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (And it is.Never really enjoyed Hardy.)
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
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 Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  (Oh my gawd.....Was she the depressed one?)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome  (It's on my list but I don't have a copy yet)
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 - Enid Blyton91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery  (In French!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks (This is about the only Ian Banks I've never read. I've even read some Iain M 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  (Not sure why they have this separated out. See 14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Reading the classics

Thanks to the very entertaining Nature of Magic Blogfest I have encountered some great new people, including co-host Tessa who has made a pledge to read 12 classics this year. Now that seems like a very good idea to me.

Given that I received 100 free e-books when I bought my new e-reader this is the perfect opportunity for me.  I read a lot of classics at school because I had to, and I can't say I enjoyed them all that much. So there's a few I want to go back to and try again now that I'm a grown up!

One of the first on my list is Silas Marner, although I admit I have already read a part-finished work by Dickens this weekend called A Message From the Sea, which I'm going to count. Beyond that I don't know. I've never read The Great Gatsby and I think I should.

I shall keep you informed how I get on.

This will provide a link that tells you a bit more:

Oh my! What have I done?

I swear I fought it. I wasn't going to do this. But I've fallen for it. After trying to track down an old book online and finding that it was no longer available in print I realised that the only way forward was electronic.

I promise I didn't mean to. I thought I'd never get used to the idea of reading anything but a block of printed paper in my hand. Not so. I have been seduced by a lightweight (about the same as a bag of barleysugars) shiny, silver siren and promises of free books. FREE BOOKS!

Yes folks, I can now hold in my hand around 100 (because I haven't uploaded any more yet) classics. I have the complete works of Dickens, ditto for Oscar Wilde, some Austen, Brontës, poetry, plays, and novels I haven't even heard of - let alone read!

And it's easy. So easy to read from the machine. A touch of my finger turns the pages and it feels so good.
I have crossed to the dark side