BBC Book List

I'm embarrassed to reply to this Facebook Tag from Minh, because she's pretty much read them all!

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here.

How do your reading habits stack up? Instructions: Copy this into your NOTES. Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read. Tag other book nerds.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - X
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - X
6 The Bible - X (well, most of it anyway)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
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 - X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - (half an X, I mean really, who has read the complete works? Besides old Bill himself, I mean?)
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
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 Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - X
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 - (another half an X as I haven't read the entire series)
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - 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
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - 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 - X
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - X
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
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 - 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
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
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - X
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante - X
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
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
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
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 - X
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - X (in French!)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
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
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

Grand Total: 35

Who made this list up anyway?? War and Peace alongside Bridget Jones's Diary....I'm just saying. Oh well, at least I've read more than 6!

First Fifteen

My latest Facebook tag....Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. Tag 15 friends, including me because I'm interested in seeing what books my friends choose...

1. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver - Probably my favorite, all-time book, if I was forced to choose one. Barbara Kingsolver is brilliant. I wish I had one-tenth of her writing ability.

2. The Dark Tower Series by Stephen King - If you've read them, you understand. I've read every book Stephen King has written, but these are my faves.

3. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling - I fell in love with the characters in this series. Can't imagine I'll ever be at the store at midnight to buy a book again!

4. The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffeneger - Such a poignant, heart wrenching love story. I love the idea that the twists and turns of fate bring us to the people we're meant to connect with. The story plays with that theme in such a cool way.

5. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris - Hilarious. David Sedaris cracks me up.

6. All Creatures Great and Small by James Herriot - I didn't read this until about a year ago. What a wonderful memoir! I hope to read some of the sequels this summer.

7. The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan - The strong females in this book made such an impression on me when I read it in the early 90s.

8. Beloved by Toni Morrison - Beautifully crafted. I was able to enter a world that is completely different from my reality, yet still connect with the characters.

9. The Thorn Birds by Colleen McCullough - The first "big girl" book I read, when I was about 14 or 15. Sex? In books? Oh my goodness...

10. Into Thin Air by John Krakauer - I loved reading about the mechanics of an expedition up Everest. I grieved for the folks who didn't make it back from this particular ill-fated trek.

11. Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel - The movie is even better.

12. The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield - This book inspired my Master's thesis!

13. Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert - After having it recommended to me by something like 15 different people, I finally connected with this book in the midst of my divorce. And it helped.

14. He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt - Why did it take someone so long to write this down? It should be required reading for girls entering puberty.

15. Memoirs!!: The Year of Yes by Maria Dahvana Headley; Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt; The Class Castle by Jeannette Walls; A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers; I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou - I love memoirs!!

What is the What?

I am reading a book right now called What is the What. It's not a quick, easy read, so it's taking me quite some time to finish. It's an amazing book. I picked it up because it was written by Dave Eggers, who runs the very cool McSweeney's website and also wrote A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which I loved. 

Anyway, What is the What is the true story of Valentino Achak Deng, one of the "lost boys of Sudan." The country of Sudan has long been in the throes of civil war and religious infighting. Thousands of orphaned boys (and some girls) were forced during the 1980's to abandon their decimated villages and walk hundreds of miles to refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya. These lost boys grew up in the camps and many of them have since immigrated to the United States, where they are typically sponsored by an American family until they are comfortable with western culture. 

Deng's story is, as you can imagine, bittersweet, as he tells the details of his childhood in his home village, the long walk he endured, his time in refugee camps, and finally his adjustment to life in Atlanta. Throughout the book, you get the sense that Deng was never made bitter by his harsh existence, that he always maintains dignity, hope, and a sense of responsibility toward his fellow Sudanese. 

It's a story that needed telling, if only to remind us of the horrible things going on in other parts of the world, and the importance of having compassion for other human beings. I definitely encourage everyone to check it out.