2/25/09

Okay, so I've Never Read A Book By Charles Dickens...Ease Up, Okay!!!

I did a little book survey of a popular list of 100 book, which included some Charles Dicken's novels, and I realized I had never read anything by this author.

It rather took me by surprise.

I think my brother, Raymond Pert, almost had a heart attack when he found out.

So, this evening, I went downstairs to one of our bookshelves, and I had the choice of "Great Expectations", "Oliver Twist" or "A Tale of Two Cities". I chose the latter.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times....

I just finished the teen vampire novel "Twilight", which was a pretty quick read, and now I am moving into something a little bit different.

I'll let you know what I think once I'm done.

Some people have told me reading Dickens will get me out of my Gray Funk.

We'll see.

But, I had read 34 of the 100 books listed. And some of them are on my bookshelf, I just haven't read them yet.

In case you are curious, here is the list of books, and the ones I have read have an X by them.


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien X
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
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwel X
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (On my shelf)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott X
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (working on it)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (On my shelf)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell X
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
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll X
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame X
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X
34 Emma - Jane Austen (on my shelf)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (On my shelf)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
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 (on my shelf)
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
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding X
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (On my shelf)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon x This is such a great book!!!
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (reading right now)
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 X
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (On my shelf)
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 (On my shelf)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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 X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albon x
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery X
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 (on my shelf)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (on my shelf)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl X
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x (One of the best books I've ever read!!)

3 comments:

JBelle said...

After you finish up with Madame DuFarge (you didn't have to read this sophomore year at KHS?), read The Kite Runner. It'll lift you away and take you far, far away. Funk? what funk? ;)

Christy Woolum said...

I have only read 21 on this list. I guess I choose unpopular books! I agree with JBelle's comment on The Kite Runner. We read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time in book group and it is a very different, interesting book. People had mixed reviews, but I liked it. I have A Prayer for Owen Meany ( one of the purchases from our trip last summer) ready to read on my pile!

Carol Woolum Roberts said...

No, didn't have to read Madame DuFarge. I think I was too busy reading Of Mice and Men, and Lord of the Flies, and books like that in high school. So, this goes on my list. I'll put Kite Runner on my list, too. Z2 read it in school last year, and we had it as a book club selection, but I didn't read it. So, happy reading for me!!!