Major Works of Literature-a survey

It's strange, but I haven't been in a reading mood lately. I was loving Alphie McCourt's book, but I'm at a bit of a standstill in the reading of it. It will pick up again soon, and I'll post about it. In the meantime, here's a little survey that my friend Karen posted on Facebook this morning. I completed it and am posting for you. I'd love to see which of these you have read, loved, and/or are planning to read. I have no idea how true the statement at the beginning is, but whatever... :-)

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.
5) Tag the person who sent you this

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen X +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte X * (required reading in high school, so I didn't enjoy it...that'll change, though)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling X +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee X +
6 The Bible (I've read part, but not all) + *
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman *
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens * (I started it once...I'll finish someday)
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 not read all, but I've loved all that I've read so far!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier *
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien X +
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliott
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell *
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald X
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 (I've started it before...I'll finish it someday!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens *
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis X +++
34 Emma - Jane Austen X +
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis X + (why is this listed separately from Chronicles?)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden X ++
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne *
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell X
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 X (I HATED this one!)
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 X +++
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley X + (This one scared me...)
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 X +++
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 X +++ (scared me out of my mind...I loved it!)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce X
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 X +
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker *
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro *
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert X +
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 X +++
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare X ++
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I've read bits & pieces...but I can't find a nice, unabridged copy...) *

TOTAL READ: 28 plus several partials
TOTAL LOVED: 22
TOTAL PLAN TO READ: All of the remaining are in the plan...the *s are the ones I especially want to read.

A Long Stone's Throw by Alphie McCourt

In high school, Angela's Ashes, by Frank McCourt, was required reading for most of the school. I was in the gifted & talented program, though, and had a different set of required literature. Everyone hated Angela's Ashes, as I remember, but something about it intrigued me, and I desperately wanted to read it. As soon as I got my hands on a copy, I read it and was hooked from page one. I proceeded to read the sequels: 'Tis, and later, Teacher Man, each purchased on the day of release. I want very much to meet Frank McCourt someday. I can only hope I have the chance. These books are his memoirs, written in such a way that in my head I hear his accent and even inflection, and can imagine myself sitting in his classroom listening to his stories, rather than reading them from across the country.

Alphie McCourt is the youngest brother of Frank, and in wandering in Barnes & Noble last weekend, I recognized his name immediately upon seeing this book, A Long Stone's Throw, on the shelf. I had to buy it! His writing style is a bit different from his brother's, but equally easy and engaging. I'm half-way through and love it.

These books, all of them, have a common thread in my mind: hope in the midst of hopelessness, overcoming all odds. They are sad, funny, bitingly honest, but hopeful even when despairing.

My favorite quote so far:

Newspapers, spread and layered among old overcoats and blankets, provide great
insulation against the cold. And our tablecloth is a newspaper. But when we try
to read books at the table, Mam despairs of us. "Yee always have yeer heads
buried in a book." We persist in trying to read at the table, but she won't
allow it. Such a practice is bad manners, she tells us, but we read anyway. We
read the newspaper tablecloth, even upside down. Reading, a terrible addiction.

I especially love that last sentence! I'll post again when I've finished it!

Hello!

The love of learning, the sequestered nooks,
And all the sweet serenity of books.
~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is very little that I enjoy more than reading. I spend more money on books than on anything else. A few months ago, I started keeping track of what I was reading, and why, as well as what I'd recently finished reading, through a box on my Facebook profile. However, I only keep my last two reads and my current read on there, and there is no way to save my previous "entries" there, so I decided to start blogging it. My opinions might not be worth anything to anybody else (I'm too prone to liking everything I pick up...) but I wanted a registry for myself that was more lasting than that little box on Facebook. This will provide a place to copy out passages that I like, without marking up my precious books, and allow me to look back later to remind myself of particular favorites that perhaps I'd like to pick up again sometime. Also, if you happen to read this and pick up on what I seem to like, I'm always open to suggestions, so feel free to make recommendations!