Wednesday, October 24, 2007

The Book Game

As I'm still totally inspirationless - everthing just seems to have come to a screeching halt - I decided to play this game that I poached from Ticknart . Of course, being anal like I am, I sorted the titles into alphabetical order.

From this list of books you must:
  • Bold those you've read.
  • Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
  • Italicize books you have started but couldn't finish. (I've also bolded 'cause I can't help but comment and comments are in italics)
  • Underline those on your To Be Read list. (I don't seem to have underline on my toolbar and I don't know the HTML code so I'll just make it teal - oh and if someone knows the code - Ticknart obviously does - please let me know, pull me out of this cesspool of HTML ignorance)


1984 *

A Clockwork Orange

A Confederacy of Dunces *

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

A People's History of the United States: 1492-Present

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I had to read it for class, lordy how I hated that book. And by extension James Joyce. Stream of conciousness and I don't do well together. It's bad enough my own brain is all over the place, I don't need to read a book that's all over the place too.)

A Short History of Nearly Everything (Pretty much the only book of Bill Bryson's I haven't read yet. It's on my shelf. It's waiting patiently)

A Tale of Two Cities

American Gods (I'm discovering Neil Gaiman, love him)

Anansi Boys
(Ditto)

Angela's Ashes (But honestly, I didn't see what all the fuss was about)

Angels & Demons (Did the Da Vinci Code thing, good thriller, but not enough to get me reading all his other stuff)

Atlas Shrugged (I'm not so big on Ayn Rand either)

Beloved

Brave New World *

Catch-22 *

Cloud Atlas

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Crime and Punishment

Cryptonomicon

David Copperfield

Don Quixote

Dracula *

Dubliners (It's Joyce. I want nothing to do with it!)

Dune

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

Emma

Foucault's Pendulum

Frankenstein

Freakonomics

Gravity's Rainbow

Great Expectations

Gulliver's Travels

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies

In Cold Blood

Jane Eyre

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (I have it on my shelf, I'm just waiting for the "right" moment)

Les Misérables *

Life of Pi: A Novel (Everyone has told me this is a great book, I've tried five - count 'em FIVE - times I can't get past page 30 or so. Perhaps one day I'll give it another go)

Lolita

Love in the Time of Cholera

Madame Bovary

Mansfield Park

Memoirs of a Geisha (again, on the shelf, twiddling it's literary thumbs)

Middlemarch

Middlesex

Moby Dick

Mrs. Dalloway

Neverwhere (this book is how I discovered Neil Gaiman)

Northanger Abbey

Oliver Twist

On the Road

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (does it count as extra reads if you've seen the movie 6 or 7 times?)

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Oryx and Crake (I love Atwood)

Persuasion (this one should be half bold. I'm pretty sure I read it but I'm not quite certain)

Pride and Prejudice

Quicksilver

Reading Lolita in Tehran

Sense and Sensibility

Slaughterhouse-Five

Tess of the D'Urbervilles *

The Aeneid (I much preferred Homer's Odessey and Illiad - and Dan Simmons' Ilium and Olympos)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Blind Assassin (shelf)

The Brothers Karamazov * (one of my all time favourites)

The Canterbury Tales

The Catcher in the Rye *

The Confusion

The Corrections (This book made me laugh out loud more than once)

The Count of Monte Cristo ('Cause the count? He was a Dude! I had such a crush on that character...)

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (Briliant book this is, I picked it up because the cover was cool... my criteria for reading a book are not necessarily logical, but mostly they work...)

The Fountainhead (Ayn again...)

The God of Small Things

The Grapes of Wrath (Love me some Steinbeck)

The Historian (Finally, a vampire book where the vampire is not a romantic tortured soul, but a complete monster like Stoker meant them to be. I almost missed out on this one because I figured it would be another Rice-ish vampire. Lestat was cool, by the tenth book it was a bit annoying)

The Hobbit * (How can Lord of the Rings not be on this list????)

The Hunchback of Notre Dame

The Iliad

The Inferno

The Kite Runner

The Mists of Avalon

The Name of the Rose

The Odyssey

The Once and Future King

The Picture of Dorian Gray

The Poisonwood Bible

The Prince

The Satanic Verses

The Scarlet Letter

The Silmarillion

The Sound and the Fury (I flipped through Faulkner's As I Lay Dying once. One of the chapters read: My mother is a fish. Then on to the next chapter. I guess I should give him a chance...)

The Three Musketeers

The Time Traveller's Wife

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (I obviously seem to like book titles that begin with "The")

To the Lighthouse

Treasure Island

Ulysses (Joyce again *shudder*)

Vanity Fair

War and Peace

Watership Down

White Teeth

Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (I just read Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister. My first Maguire. All his others, including Wicked, are on the shelf)

Wuthering Heights

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

5 comments:

choochoo said...

now I feel the urge to go read something for the rest of the day

That girl said...

This is a very cool list. I think it's one I'll print out and keep handy for when I'm looking 'for a good book'.

pissed off patricia said...

I think I enjoyed the Kite Runner more than any book I have read in a long time.

ticknart said...

Gaiman is very, very good. I know they're not your standard books, but I highly recommend his Sandman comics (graphic novels if you want to be pretentious about it). Excellent stuff.

geewits said...

See this is one of those things where I get sort of dyslexic. I have to keep scrolling to the top to see the codes. I had the same problem with Ticknart's post on this. But at least you've read The Count of Monte Cristo. Did you read it in French?

(The post office guy said 5 to 10 days.)