I'm up to chapter 7 in the Hobbit. So far Bilbo has set out a journey with the dwarfs but got separated from them in a cave and found Gollum's ring. Then he tricked Gollum into showing him the way out of the cave and back to the dwarfs.
I have tried to read this book at least once before and it ended probably before page 20. This time I got past the part where nothing happens for a while and on to something a little more exciting. I like it, so I ordered the whole series (along with a couple other books on the list) and they should be arriving soon!
So...that's all I have to say about the Hobbit so far...lame, right? I should have way more to say considering it's such an epic story, but oh well. School work and trying to find a summer job (let alone a real job) have taken all my energy.
Tuesday, March 30, 2010
Saturday, March 27, 2010
Books I HAVE Read
I mentioned before that I had read 13 books on this list. I should probably list out what they are:
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
76 The Inferno – Dante
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
I'm debating rereading some of these...it has been a long time since I have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Anne of Green Gables, Animal Farm, and Winnie the Pooh. Although I remember loving these books (not Animal Farm, though) I can't remember much about them besides what I can recall from movies and tv shows. So, to be fair, I may end up reading these again.
Also, I will probably, along with my friend, who is now embarking on this journey with me (so that when we get an apartment together we can have a lot of impressive books out) revise the list slightly, or at least take off a few of the books we will never read and substitute a couple that we will. Although I suppose I can report on that when it happens.
Favorite book so far: Anna Karenina, hands down. (I also really like Because of Winn Dixie, but that's not on the list. I guess it's the teacher in me.)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
76 The Inferno – Dante
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
I'm debating rereading some of these...it has been a long time since I have read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Anne of Green Gables, Animal Farm, and Winnie the Pooh. Although I remember loving these books (not Animal Farm, though) I can't remember much about them besides what I can recall from movies and tv shows. So, to be fair, I may end up reading these again.
Also, I will probably, along with my friend, who is now embarking on this journey with me (so that when we get an apartment together we can have a lot of impressive books out) revise the list slightly, or at least take off a few of the books we will never read and substitute a couple that we will. Although I suppose I can report on that when it happens.
Favorite book so far: Anna Karenina, hands down. (I also really like Because of Winn Dixie, but that's not on the list. I guess it's the teacher in me.)
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-part 3
"Cheshire-Puss," she began, rather timidly, as she did not at all know whether it would like the name: however, it only grinned a little wider. "Come, it's pleased so far," thought Alice, and she went on. "Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?"So true! If you don't have an ending goal or desired result in mind, there is no way you can choose the wrong path. In this part of the book, at the very least, I feel like the cat is the only source of reason. And that is what I like the most about the Cheshire cat--the character who is a talking animal that can appear and disappear at will, relocate to other locations in a flash, and make only parts of his body appear in thin air is the only character in the book worth listening to.
"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.
"I don't much care where--" said Alice.
"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.
"--so long as I get somewhere," Alice added as an explanation.
"Oh, you're sure to do that," said the Cat, "if you only walk long enough."
...replied Alice; "and I wish you wouldn't keep appearing and vanishing so suddenly: you make one quite giddy!"
"All right," said the Cat; and this time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.
So, I finished Alice in Wonderland. I really was interested in the details from the book that contributed to continuity among film versions. One example I noticed was the queen's croquet game. In both the Tim Burton version as well as Disney's animated version, the mallets were flamingos and the balls were hedgehogs. This detail did indeed show up in the book. Another detail that I thought Disney may have taken liberties with, but was actually in the book was the painting the roses red part. Being unfamiliar with Carroll's story until this point, I wasn't sure how much of these films were people's interpretations influencing each other vs. how much was actually included in Carroll's writing. However, I was confused when I got to the end of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" and I had not yet met Tweedledee and Tweedledum. They do show up in "Through the Looking Glass," which I am currently reading.Burton's version, although it uses many characters from Carroll's two books, does not follow the storyline much at all, save for the key-table-eat me-drink me part from chapter 1. However, the plot in the Burton version seemed much more cohesive than Disney's animated version. Before reading the book, I though that perhaps Disney was in a strange stage with its movies and perhaps having disjointed scenes was part of the style. However, each chapter in "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" as well as "Through the Looking Glass" tells about a new place or person that Alice met. However, there is not really much of a story in "Wonderland" besides Alice looking for a white rabbit and exploring. I was interested in the book because I wanted to see what would happen to Alice next, or who she would meet, but as far as a plot driving the story forward, there is not one that stands out in my mind.
I am not enjoying "Through the Looking Glass" as much as "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" although it is answering my questions about characters I did not encounter in the first book (the Tweedles, the singing flowers) and things I knew were coming (Walrus and the Carpenter, the Jabberwocky). I'm on chapter 5 of that one now, with about 70 pages to go.
One last quote from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland"
"Every thing's got a moral, if only you can find it"
-spoken by the Duchess
I love this quote as well because if you really look for it, you can find a moral or reason for everything. I guess there is a lot of truth in this book that is embedded and spoken by mad people and thus disregarded by the reader due to the character's mental state.
Next up: THE HOBBIT
Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-Part 2
"Who are you? said the Caterpillar.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, "I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present-at least, I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."
I am up to chapter 6 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland now. I'm going to do a summary of chapters 2-6 for my own purposes (spoiler alert!) and then talk about what
Summary: Alice grew to 9 feet in the hall, and then cried, and then shrunk back down so that she was swimming in the "pool of tears" (title of chapter 2). At that point, she came across a swimming doormouse that lead her to shore. At the shore, Alice met a dodo bird that had everyone running in a circle to get dry. The White Rabbit appeared again, thought Alice was someone named Mary Ann, presumably his maid, and she followed him back to his house. In the house, Alice saw more "Eat Me" cakes, so she ate them and grew (point #1). Alice then grew too big for the house and was entirely stuffed inside. The White Rabbit found his friend Pat and Bill, a lizard, to determine what was in the house and to get it out. When they realized that it was Alice, they started throwing more "Eat Me" cakes at her, so she ate the cakes and shrunk once again. She ran from the house, encountered a dog, ran from the dog, and then came upon a large mushroom with a caterpillar smoking hookah on top. The caterpillar and Alice talk in circles and Alice comes to the conclusion that she doesn't really know who she is anymore, and is frustrated with changing sizes so often (point #2). The caterpillar walks away, telling Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her grow, while the other side will make her shrink. She bites the growing side and becomes taller than trees. A bird thinks that she is a serpent, and although she tries to reason with him, telling him that she is a girl and not hunting eggs, he does not believe her. She then eats more of the mushroom and shrinks to her regular size (point #3). At the end of chapter 6, Alice encounters a little house, about as tall as she, and so she decides to find out what is inside, but not before shrinking a little more as to not frighten whoever or whatever is inside.
END OF SUMMARY
In general, the growing and shrinking is getting a little old at this point. It is making it increasingly difficult to figure out what size Alice is at any particular point in the story. Also, I can't remember another book I have read where a character shrinks like this. So, I've come to the conclusion that shrinking means something, but I'm not sure what exactly.
Point #1: When Alice eats the "Eat Me" cakes while inside the Rabbit's house, she says "I know something interesting is sure to happen....whenever I eat or drink anything: so I'll just see what this bottle does." Alice is indeed very curious about her new surroundings, and adventurous to be trying whatever she comes across, hoping that it will bring about some welcome change. She goes on to say "I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!" and then she grows too big for the house. There are definitely tones of "be careful what you wish for," but also the idea that it's not always luck that puts one in a strange situation.
Point #2: Because Alice keeps eating everything in sight, hoping things will happen to her, she is really bringing all the changes upon herself. Her desire to get into the garden in the beginning of the book started this, and as she grew and shrank even more, more problems arose. If she had, in the first chapter, brought the key with her, or unlocked the door when she was tall, before drinking to become small, all of these problems would not even exist. Alice is frustrated with her lot at the beginning of chapter 6, but in reality she has no one to blame but herself. She followed the rabbit, and she drank and ate strange food and drinks, so she is the only one responsible. Luckily there are creatures in Wonderland to help her out so far, providing her with cakes and drinks, or a magical mushroom in the case of the caterpillar.
Point #3: At this point, Alice has realized, thanks to the caterpillar, that she is in control of her size. Due to her experience with the bird in chapter 6, she now has the foresight to make herself the correct size for each new event or setting in Wonderland. Although, she desires so much to be her regular height, but who is to say what is actually "regular" in Wonderland, or even in general. And is Alice able to know if she is the perfect height that she is used to being? I'm wondering if I had grown and shrank and was transported to a magical land, and given a mushroom, as Alice was, I'm not confident that I could make myself the height that I am now.
I do love the caterpillar, though. I found him very creepy in the Disney version of this movie, and also saw the caterpillar played by the voice of Snape in Tim Burton's version. However, in the book he seems less grumpy. Although he does have very short answers, he is testing Alice to see if she knows herself. I mean, if I were a caterpillar smoking hookah on a mushroom, and some teeny tiny girl comes up and looks at me, I would ask her who she is as well. And if she couldn't answer, I would become frustrated with her. I love that he gives her the mysterious mushroom to try to make her happy (as if that could happen....human nature comment, what?) I kind of wonder though, what makes that mushroom so special. Maybe the hookah seasoned it, haha.
I think that's where I'll leave Alice for a day while I start my grad school homework, which consists of reading a Twilight-esque book. I feel like perhaps that is not the most scholarly thing but I guess I can comment on that later.
This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, "I-I hardly know, Sir, just at present-at least, I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then."
I am up to chapter 6 in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland now. I'm going to do a summary of chapters 2-6 for my own purposes (spoiler alert!) and then talk about whatSummary: Alice grew to 9 feet in the hall, and then cried, and then shrunk back down so that she was swimming in the "pool of tears" (title of chapter 2). At that point, she came across a swimming doormouse that lead her to shore. At the shore, Alice met a dodo bird that had everyone running in a circle to get dry. The White Rabbit appeared again, thought Alice was someone named Mary Ann, presumably his maid, and she followed him back to his house. In the house, Alice saw more "Eat Me" cakes, so she ate them and grew (point #1). Alice then grew too big for the house and was entirely stuffed inside. The White Rabbit found his friend Pat and Bill, a lizard, to determine what was in the house and to get it out. When they realized that it was Alice, they started throwing more "Eat Me" cakes at her, so she ate the cakes and shrunk once again. She ran from the house, encountered a dog, ran from the dog, and then came upon a large mushroom with a caterpillar smoking hookah on top. The caterpillar and Alice talk in circles and Alice comes to the conclusion that she doesn't really know who she is anymore, and is frustrated with changing sizes so often (point #2). The caterpillar walks away, telling Alice that one side of the mushroom will make her grow, while the other side will make her shrink. She bites the growing side and becomes taller than trees. A bird thinks that she is a serpent, and although she tries to reason with him, telling him that she is a girl and not hunting eggs, he does not believe her. She then eats more of the mushroom and shrinks to her regular size (point #3). At the end of chapter 6, Alice encounters a little house, about as tall as she, and so she decides to find out what is inside, but not before shrinking a little more as to not frighten whoever or whatever is inside.
END OF SUMMARY
In general, the growing and shrinking is getting a little old at this point. It is making it increasingly difficult to figure out what size Alice is at any particular point in the story. Also, I can't remember another book I have read where a character shrinks like this. So, I've come to the conclusion that shrinking means something, but I'm not sure what exactly.
Point #1: When Alice eats the "Eat Me" cakes while inside the Rabbit's house, she says "I know something interesting is sure to happen....whenever I eat or drink anything: so I'll just see what this bottle does." Alice is indeed very curious about her new surroundings, and adventurous to be trying whatever she comes across, hoping that it will bring about some welcome change. She goes on to say "I do hope it'll make me grow large again, for really I'm quite tired of being such a tiny little thing!" and then she grows too big for the house. There are definitely tones of "be careful what you wish for," but also the idea that it's not always luck that puts one in a strange situation.
Point #2: Because Alice keeps eating everything in sight, hoping things will happen to her, she is really bringing all the changes upon herself. Her desire to get into the garden in the beginning of the book started this, and as she grew and shrank even more, more problems arose. If she had, in the first chapter, brought the key with her, or unlocked the door when she was tall, before drinking to become small, all of these problems would not even exist. Alice is frustrated with her lot at the beginning of chapter 6, but in reality she has no one to blame but herself. She followed the rabbit, and she drank and ate strange food and drinks, so she is the only one responsible. Luckily there are creatures in Wonderland to help her out so far, providing her with cakes and drinks, or a magical mushroom in the case of the caterpillar.
Point #3: At this point, Alice has realized, thanks to the caterpillar, that she is in control of her size. Due to her experience with the bird in chapter 6, she now has the foresight to make herself the correct size for each new event or setting in Wonderland. Although, she desires so much to be her regular height, but who is to say what is actually "regular" in Wonderland, or even in general. And is Alice able to know if she is the perfect height that she is used to being? I'm wondering if I had grown and shrank and was transported to a magical land, and given a mushroom, as Alice was, I'm not confident that I could make myself the height that I am now.
I do love the caterpillar, though. I found him very creepy in the Disney version of this movie, and also saw the caterpillar played by the voice of Snape in Tim Burton's version. However, in the book he seems less grumpy. Although he does have very short answers, he is testing Alice to see if she knows herself. I mean, if I were a caterpillar smoking hookah on a mushroom, and some teeny tiny girl comes up and looks at me, I would ask her who she is as well. And if she couldn't answer, I would become frustrated with her. I love that he gives her the mysterious mushroom to try to make her happy (as if that could happen....human nature comment, what?) I kind of wonder though, what makes that mushroom so special. Maybe the hookah seasoned it, haha.
I think that's where I'll leave Alice for a day while I start my grad school homework, which consists of reading a Twilight-esque book. I feel like perhaps that is not the most scholarly thing but I guess I can comment on that later.
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland-Part 1
So far I have only read chapter 1 (it's all I had time for this morning before a meeting.) At the end of the tenth page, Alice had already followed the White Rabbit, fell down the rabbit hole, landed at the bottom, tried the key in all the doors, shrunk, and started growing. Based on this, I'm exciting because it seems like the action will be fast. Looking through the book it looks like there is a lot of poetry. I'm not sure what the purpose of this is--whether it is Carroll's style or if this was typical of literature in his time period. Nothing super interesting to report this time. Maybe I'll have more interesting things to say once the book starts getting more trippy.
Book List
My friend spoke of the following list of books a couple of days ago:
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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
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
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
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
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
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 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 - Mark Haddon
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
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
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 Inferno – Dante
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
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 x
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 Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Apparently the majority of people have read 6 of these books. I have read 13, cover to cover. Probably about 10 more were assigned to me at some point in high school, and if I was lucky I made it through the first chapter. I was not much of a reader in school, but now that I am out of college and no longer forced to read these books, I'm going to try again. I think for me, knowing that someone was forcing me to read anything made me want to read it less, so, I'm trying again on my own terms.
The inspiration for this project came from a few different places. First, the friend who sent me this list is starting her own blog and it looked like fun, so here goes my attempt, in a "Julie and Julia" sort of fashion. Also, I've always been interested in works that are deemed "classic," and even more intrigued by the notion that hardly anyone has read or watched any of these classics. I tried to make it through AFI's 100 greatest movies of all time or one of those lists, but got distracted and never actually finished, so maybe movies will make an appearance too.
But I guess the thing that really got this going was my going to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (in 3D, no less) last weekend. Even though I woke up on Monday with blurred vision, no balance, and convoluted depth perception, (hopefully due to the 3D experience), I still was interested in the story of Alice in Wonderland. I started to see similarities between that movie and the animated Disney version, and I began to wonder what Lewis Carroll had actually written that made the images in both films so similar. So, on a shopping trip to get fabric for a new purse I am making (another project), I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, first published in England in 1865 and 1871, respectively.
In future posts, I will probably talk about my new project as a whole, as well as the books I am reading and how it's going so far. Even though I would, as a rule, start with #1, I am starting with #29 because
1. I don't want to start off this long journey with a story that I do not like i.e. Pride and Prejudice. (So sue me, I really don't get the hype...but I can talk about that later when I try to read it again)
2. I already have Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
3. I'm contemplating going really crazy and reading out of order (gasp!)
Also, there is NO way I am reading the Bible OR the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Just throwing that out there. I have read parts of both of these before, and having been an (almost) English major, I've read enough Shakespeare to know what he is all about. As for the Bible....I actually did try to read that once simply because I wanted to know ALL the stories. And, surprisingly, I did get through Leviticus before I abandoned that project. However, I feel like I know what I need to know from that one and it's not meant to be read cover to cover anyway. Plus, if I'm going to read a religious book like that, I might as well read something that I am not as familiar with. So, I'll contemplate that one later.
As for now, I'll enlighten you with my reading of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (#29).
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
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
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
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
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
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
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
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
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
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
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 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 - Mark Haddon
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
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
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 Inferno – Dante
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
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 x
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 Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain 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
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Apparently the majority of people have read 6 of these books. I have read 13, cover to cover. Probably about 10 more were assigned to me at some point in high school, and if I was lucky I made it through the first chapter. I was not much of a reader in school, but now that I am out of college and no longer forced to read these books, I'm going to try again. I think for me, knowing that someone was forcing me to read anything made me want to read it less, so, I'm trying again on my own terms.
The inspiration for this project came from a few different places. First, the friend who sent me this list is starting her own blog and it looked like fun, so here goes my attempt, in a "Julie and Julia" sort of fashion. Also, I've always been interested in works that are deemed "classic," and even more intrigued by the notion that hardly anyone has read or watched any of these classics. I tried to make it through AFI's 100 greatest movies of all time or one of those lists, but got distracted and never actually finished, so maybe movies will make an appearance too.
But I guess the thing that really got this going was my going to see Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland (in 3D, no less) last weekend. Even though I woke up on Monday with blurred vision, no balance, and convoluted depth perception, (hopefully due to the 3D experience), I still was interested in the story of Alice in Wonderland. I started to see similarities between that movie and the animated Disney version, and I began to wonder what Lewis Carroll had actually written that made the images in both films so similar. So, on a shopping trip to get fabric for a new purse I am making (another project), I stopped at Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of Alice's Adventures In Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass, first published in England in 1865 and 1871, respectively.
In future posts, I will probably talk about my new project as a whole, as well as the books I am reading and how it's going so far. Even though I would, as a rule, start with #1, I am starting with #29 because
1. I don't want to start off this long journey with a story that I do not like i.e. Pride and Prejudice. (So sue me, I really don't get the hype...but I can talk about that later when I try to read it again)
2. I already have Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
3. I'm contemplating going really crazy and reading out of order (gasp!)
Also, there is NO way I am reading the Bible OR the Complete Works of Shakespeare. Just throwing that out there. I have read parts of both of these before, and having been an (almost) English major, I've read enough Shakespeare to know what he is all about. As for the Bible....I actually did try to read that once simply because I wanted to know ALL the stories. And, surprisingly, I did get through Leviticus before I abandoned that project. However, I feel like I know what I need to know from that one and it's not meant to be read cover to cover anyway. Plus, if I'm going to read a religious book like that, I might as well read something that I am not as familiar with. So, I'll contemplate that one later.
As for now, I'll enlighten you with my reading of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (#29).
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