Challenge: How Many Of These Have You Read?

When I noticed this over on a lot of blogs, I just had to do it. For one thing, it's a book tag! For another thing, it's also a literary tag! 


And I want to show the BBC that there are, in fact, quite a few people--like my fellow bloggers here who did this--who are well-read and have consumed more than 6 of these titles!


Rules for the challenge:


• Copy this list.
• Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
• Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.


And as a bonus, I'm going to underline those I'm thinking about reading next year.


Commentary is in aqua.



Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
(Blah. I didn't like Pride and Prejudice)
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
(One of my favorite books.)
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
(Favorite again.)
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
(Interesting . . .)
The King James Bible
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
(Ideas/opinions made me think. I know this book is controversial.)
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
(Read it in one day. Liked it then, not particularly interested now . . .)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare
(I've read a collection--but not every single play.)
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
(My mom read this to me.)
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
(I got around 150 pages in, and then it just flopped for me. It was too boring.)
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
(BOO, Scarlett! Rhett Butler--hmph.)
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
(The translation was odd--they put the French parts in footnotes, but put the Russian where it would be if it was being read normally. I should try reading it again, though.)
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
(Love.)
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
(I'm interested in this one.)
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
(Hate Alice in Wonderland, most of the time--I like the recent movie, though.)
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
(Started, never finished. We have to copy, so I should read it . . .)
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
(Interested. It's a pretty famous book, and I can't forget Lemony Snicket's comment from Horseradish. :D)
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
(Enjoy this series.)
Emma -Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
(Um, you just listed the Chronicles of Narnia, BBC.)
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
(I have an upcoming review of this--enjoyed it a lot.)
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
(We have a collection of stories . . . does that count?)
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
(Apparently I write like this guy . . . )
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
(Never appealed to me.)
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
(Reminds me of Robert Cormier's novels. This sort of book gets me into the mood to write evil, scheming, psychologically twisted characters. I do have some of that sort in my writing.)
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John SteinbeckLolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
(I reviewed this . . . it's in the archives. Kind of dull, but at least I can say I read it!)
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
(There's an electronic copy somewhere . . . or I could just get it out of the library to read the rest. :P)
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
(I like the movie better. Ever seen it?)
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
(I want to read this book! A Short History of Nearly Everything--one of my favorite nonfic books.)
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
(This was one of the first long-ish chapter books I read.)
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
(I read Tuesdays With Morrie recently for school. Wrote an essay.)
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
(Go, Sherlock!)
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
(Interesting story.)
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
(The story, not the play. It's a strange story. I saw the PBS recent version of it, with David Tennant.)
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
(Wacky . . . never watched the movie.)
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
(Cosette is an airhead. That's what I thought after I read it. Jean Valjean--interesting enough.)


So, to tally:


21 read.
5 started, never finished.
7 to (possibly) read next year.



----The Golden Eagle

Flood Watch, Writer Things, and Coffee

I can believe it. It's been raining, raining, raining, pouring, dripping, sopping, and splishing all day long.

I realize that the last word isn't actually a word. Except I'm a writer--I've got creative license, right? Well. I say, very splishingishly, that writer's have the creative license to create new words.

But there is a lot of water. The street's sort of flooded and the gutters on the neighbor's house are pouring water. It's been dark, gloomy, and wet all day, but I'm content. I'm usually in a content mood when it's raining, and also because I've been successful editing-wise.

*****

Have any of you seen THIS POST? Or, THIS POST?

Yes? No?

Well, the second makes me laugh. Actually, the first makes me laugh because seriously, folks? If you're going to date a writer you should expect a whole different can of beans.

I don't actively lock myself up in my room or anything and write like some people do, (do you?) but I do tend to get crabby/irritable/fussy when my writing's not going right. And "writer's will remind you that money doesn't matter so much"? Ahem. A lot of writers go into the business because they're broke. I'll let you decide for yourself whether the other points are true. :D

*****

NaBloWriMo starts tomorrow! Hooray! I'm excited about this. It just seems like it's going to be fun, you know? Well, maybe I'm just overexcited. I already post pretty often . . . maybe it's the fact I won't be alone this time. :)

If you haven't joined yet, my armies are still waiting around for the next victim. (AKA you.)

*ahem*

*****

I never really liked coffee. I am repelled by the scent of coffee, especially really strong stuff; I like the smell of Barnes & Noble (one of my favorite smells) but I don't like just coffee. How do people drink it? HOW?

But apparently people do. At least according to a recent survey done by Careerbuilder and Dunkin Donuts. (I've never been to Dunkin Donuts--or Starbucks, for that matter.)

Huh. Oh, well. I plan on being a scientist; I'll just have to be a non-coffee-drinker one.

*****

End of September everyone! Can you believe it? Another month has disappeared. I think this month has gone rather well for me, since I got some stuff done . . .

What about you?

-----The Golden Eagle