My brain just shorted out trying to keep all of this straight.
I got it from Mental Multivitamin – and let me echo her title choice. Yeah, me too.
[This was a very amusing exercise, actually – mainly because I own so many books – and yet I appear to have them all catalogued perfectly in my head. I know exactly which ones I have read and owned, and which ones I have read and yet do NOT own. I didn’t even have to it for more than half a second.]
Here’s the meme:
Review the following list of books. Boldface the books you’ve read, italicize those you might read, cross out the ones you wont, put an asterisk beside the ones on your bookshelves, and place brackets around the ones youve never even heard of.
The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
*The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
*The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
*The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
*To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
*The Time Travelers Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) – it feels weird to just say flat out I won’t read something, but whatever. I won’t read it.
*Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)
*The Life of Pi (Yann Martel) – haven’t read it yet but I own it – Jean gave it to me for Christmas, and it’s on “the list” – I’m almost ready to start it
*Animal Farm: A Fairy Story (George Orwell)
*Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
*The Hobbit (J.R.R. Tolkien)
[The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon)]
*Lord of the Flies (William Golding)
* Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
*1984 (George Orwell)
*Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (J. K. Rowling)
One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
*Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt) – I have picked it up 1000 times at the book store, and thought: Hmm, should I get it? I read the back cover, flip thru … and I never ever choose it. This tells me that I will never read this book. I’m okay with that.
*Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)
*Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
*Atonement (Ian McEwan)
[The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)]
*The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway)
*The Handmaids Tale (Margaret Atwood)
*The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath)
Dune (Frank Herbert)
Sula (Toni Morrison) Argh – I like Toni Morrison but I don’t want to read this one
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)
White Teeth (Zadie Smith)
*The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)
Out of curiousity, why the no go on the Pullamn books?
I don’t know – just not my type of book.
I get so overwhelmed by my “to read someday” list that it feels good to cross at least one off the list.
I’m sure people love those books (obligatory statement). I’m just probably not going to read them. It’s not like I have anything AGAINST them or antyhing.
And as a preemptory statement (even though I hate doing that, and edited it out of the text itself):
I have nothing against any of the authors I struck out.
This is not a meme for me. I pretty much stick to SF and Fantasy. Anything classified as Literature would’ve been read in school.
Sheila, you MUST read White Teeth! I know you will love it. It’s such a good book.
That’s what I hear, Erik! I’ve read excerpts from it and she is quite a writer.
Have you read her latest? That one sounds really good, too – although I was kind of Zadie Smith-ed out from all her publicity. What’s the name of her latest one?
Oh, you’ve gotta read The Lovely Bones. I’ve read it three times; it’s wonderful.
And Lucky, too. She’s an excellent writer.
Lisa – that’s what I hear!!
Keepin’ it on the list … the ever-growing list …
Such a strange, eclectic list! I wonder how, why these were picked.
For about a third of these most of us, I’d venture to say, we were (required?) to read by the end of high school. The only authors that appear on the list twice is J.K. Rowling and George Orwell (Rowling is especially strange in that her books are part of a series)
I read a lot of these in high school – because I had to – then went back and re-read them again as a grown-up and fell in love with them.
I love that the meme includes the last in the Harry Potter series. Because obviously if you have read it, and you own it – you’re a die-hard fan. It’s just kind of illuminating, and fun, I think.
It’s hard to say I WON’T read a book because – you know – whatever – how can I say “never”?? It’s different from saying “I won’t read that because I have a problem with it” – Like: I probably will not read Ethan Hawke’s novel. Novels? Whatever. I won’t read them. I’ve read a couple sentences, and that’s it. Life’s too short, I ain’t gonna read more.
And I’m not a huge sci fi fan, so I’m just not gonna read a ton of sci-fi books, obviously. It’s just my own personal taste.
But it still feels weird to just come out and say “I won’t read Donna Tartt’s book” or what have you. hahahaha I had not even thought of how many times I have picked up that book at the bookstore and considered buying it – before moving on. Obviously that’s got to mean something! I ain’t gonna read it.
(Or I should say: the NEXT to last in the Potter series – forgive me. It’s the last one to have been PUBLISHED but there is one more coming. Uhm … counting the days???)
I just “read” Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix via… (hangs head in shame) “books on CD”.
Loaded up the last half on ITunes/my wife’s Ipod ‘cus had to return the CDs to the library before I could finish. Guess how many CDs it takes for the unabridged version? Come on guess…
OH man I have no idea. 10?? That’s a long book.
23 CDs @ ~63 minutes per CD. That’s just over one DAY (24 hours and 9 minutes)… And the reader did different voices for the dialog of all the different characters! I mean how many characters were there with dialog? I count 25, just off the top of my head.
Jim Dale was the reader, heard of him?… man that must have been a chore (Amazon.com lists the retail price for the recording as $)75
Used to have to drive a bunch for a job. A Bunch. I find no shame in the book on tape, esp. if it’s unabridged.
I couldn’t find a way to defend it, until Stephen King pointed out that often you have to concentrate harder on something you’re listening to…and it dictates the pace…your eyes can’t get tired or lazy, and skip lines, or passages…or chapters, or in the case of many books I was assigned, entire books….
In the end, I guess it falls on the individual, and I find that I personally concentrate well on the book on CD (or tape). Especially since, at the time, I didn’t have enough spare time to be able to sit and read….
And from the list, Cold Mountain is a personal favorite, and I always recommend it. It’s one of those that’s not about what’s being said for me, but how it’s being said.
Based on what he did in Cold Mountain, I think I could sit and read Frazier even if he was writing Tax Law….
I read The Secret History because my sister just insisted. I thought it was OK, but overrated. In other words, you aren’t missing anything life-changing.
I stopped reading Cold Mountain halfway through. I couldn’t go on one. more. minute. It was ponderous, and I wanted to shake that dude and tell him to shut the fuck up with the whining.
But that’s just me. ;)
I’ve heard of that Dale fellow. He’s quite in demand for his creativity as a reader on CD. He does the voices for all the books, and if I remember the interview properly, he’s not entirely sure how he does it, or even how he keeps all the voices straight. It comes naturally to him to render the dialogue that way.
Sheila, you have to read “Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime.” It should take you a few hours at most to finish it and is well worth the time. Seriously. It’s narrated by an autistic boy who one night discovers someone has killed his neighbor’s dog. It’s a murder mystery and amazingly done.
Marti – wow – I’ve never even heard of it. Your description makes it sound amazing!! Thank you!
Sheila, I haven’t read Zadie Smith’s latest book. Actually, I haven’t read any of her books other than White Teeth. I know she wrote one called The Autograph Man, but I think there’s a more recent one. I kinda got irrationally mad that she had written White Teeth at the tender age of 22 (not really mad, just I-can’t-believe-she’s-so-brilliant mad) and therefore haven’t read any of her other books, even though White Teeth is, like, one of my faves.
Zadie Smith’s new one is called ‘On Beauty’
I didn’t love it as much as I do ‘White Teeth’