Books Books Books

“The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?”

I don't know how true this is, but hey, I'll just do it for the fun of it. :-D

Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read. (ASTPM means the book is most likely sitting on my shelf waiting to be read AFTER STPM. hahahaha. Discipline, discipline!)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (ASTPM)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (ASTPM)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (X)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (X)
6 The Bible (X.. not finished yet, though)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (ASTPM)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell (I'm like super itching to read this awesome book, but.. ASTPM)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (ASTPM)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (ASTPM)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (X)
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
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (X)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens (X)
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (X)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (ASTPM)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (X)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I heard it's awesome.. but.. ASTPM)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden (X)
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne (X)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell (ASTPM)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (X)
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 (X)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood (X.. awesome book, gives you plenty to think about)
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (X.. yet another AWESOME book)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan (ASTPM.. heard it's great though)

51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert (ASTPM)
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (ASTPM)
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)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime - 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 (X)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (X)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker (X)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (X)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Inferno – Dante (X.. yet to finish it though)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession

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
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (X)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (X.. they LISTED this book? I LOVED it as a kid. Read it a hundred times over, I think)

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (I've read The Happy Prince.. lol.)
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
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (ASTPM)

Results: 26 (X)s, and... 13 (ASTPM)s. Haha, there are sooo many books collecting dust on my bookshelves because I've resisted temptation to read them. Once I start, I only stop when I reach the final page of the book. Which means sleeping at 5am at for a few days in my bid to finish a story. And there are so many books that I lovingly caress in bookshops I walk into, but put them down after debating whether to buy them or not. I love classics because they are so so cheap, you can get a classic like Hardy's 'Far from the Madding Crowd' for only Rm6.95(some of these classic series are even cool looking, hardcover books!), whereas a thriller by say.. Grisham will cost AT LEAST RM33.90(most times, Rm39.90).

I love thrillers/suspense-filled/mystery books simply because they are real page-turners, and I'm just rushing through the entire story to get to the best part, the ending. I LOVE stories with twists and turns, unpredictable. Which is why I enjoy reading Archer's and Dan Brown's books.

On the other hand, I enjoyed many of the classics in the list above simply because they gave(and still give) my mind a good work-out. Instead of going 'Ahhh..' like I do after reading a thriller, (real) literature is like.. well, brainfood. There is just so so so much to ponder over after reading books like 'Lord of the Flies' by Golding and 'The Handmaid’s Tale' by Margaret Atwood, and to just forget about such brainfood would prove an impossible task(in my case).

I love literature. :-) Only the subject is giving me a huge huge headache now because I prefer studying from books for STPM(just studying from books, no need to think at all! How awesome are Malaysian exams? Hahahaha), and pondering over issues in my own free time. But English Literature forces me to think when I'm in my laziest mood. *sigh*

Hmm. It's late now. Do copy this list and do it if you feel up to it. :-)

God bless,
Jo