Beginnings

Welcome friends! I have started this entry in the global technosphere because I have been in love with books since the age of 2. Among the busy business of being a new teacher, this is my outlet for sharing thoughts on a love of reading a wide variety of books. My inspiration can be summed up with a yearbook quote from a teacher written when I was 8: "To the only girl at recess I see reading a book. Good for you!"
My blog title is quoted from a classmate who asked me this once. Believe it or not, I've also heard it as a teacher :D

Saturday, November 27, 2010

BBC Reading Quiz

I came across this interesting post from Too Many Books, Too Little Time.  I've excerpted a bit here:

Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here.

Instructions:  Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read an excerpt.  I'll also underline the TBR shelf/list ones.

I have read 18 in full, 6 more in part (or from vague memory), and 57 are on the TBR shelf or list.  I've heard of all but #55, #63, #77, #90 & #96 but feel free to comment here & tell me about them if you've read them :)

Here's my breakdown:

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 (books 1-3)
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6. The Bible (passages only--and not since grade school)
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 (I've read 18 plays so far)
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
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
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 – A.A. Milne (some books when I was little)
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 – L.M. 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-time – 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 (I think I read this as a kid--I have a copy anyways)
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 (I think I read this as a kid & have a kids' edition of this)
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 – E.B. 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 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

I hope you'll try this out.  Let me know how you did.  Better than 6, I hope :D

11 comments:

  1. Wow. I've read 54 of these!(although some of those I admit were required reads and I never would have read them on my own.) I've never even heard of the same ones you mentioned.

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  2. It's a fun challenge, isn't it? You didn't underline #86, but it's one of my all-time favorite books. I highly recommend it!

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  3. This is the second time on the hop that I've seen the list, I really should do it!
    :)
    I love your blog design btw! Where is the background from, and how do you get it to load quickly?

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  4. I have been seeing this list around. I am so glad you posted it too. I have read only 33. A Suitable Boy is an epic saga- a hefty book set in India, with a theme about arrange marriages, a search for a suitable boy. I have not heard about the others you mentioned neither. A great list for my TBR. I might just post on this too!!

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  5. I've read 39 - I was surprised it was so many! And there are so many good books on here, usually I find lists like this a bit boring.

    You really should read "Cloud Atlas" by David Mitchell. I just loved that book.

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  6. Thanks for all the comments :)

    Jupiter~ I agree that there were several I'd never heard of but it's great to find new books!

    2many~ I'll add that one to my TBRs. I have a Mistry book from univ I haven't read yet either :(

    Deepali~ Thank you :) I got the b.g. from ShabbyBlogs.com. It's under 3-Column Backgrounds and is called Isabelle. You get the code from there & add a gadget in Design mode. As for the loading speed, I don't know how it does that but I do notice a short flash of another background when my blog loads. Not sure why that is but I like it anyway :D

    BookQuoter~ A Suitable Boy sounds interesting. I'll keep it in mind.

    Sam~ Good for you! I feel behind on this but hopefully the challenges I'm taking on in 2011 will bump up my number :) I've heard of Cloud Atlas but you've peaked my curiosity...I'll add it to that ever-growing list of TBRs.

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  7. I've read 30, though many were so long ago I have only the faintest recollection of reading them. More are on my TBR list, and a couple are on the list of books I started and couldn't finish (like Memoirs of a Geisha. I don't know why. Everyone else loves that book and I just couldn't get into it.)

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  8. Hi, FYI, these two are missing from your list:
    #23 - Bleak House- Charles Dickens
    #26 - Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh

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  9. It's been interesting to see what everyone's been "bolding" on their list. I couldn't resist, and just posted my own. :)

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  10. BookQuoter~ Ooops! Thanks, I've fixed it now.

    Jo~ It's certainly a popular post this week :)

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