a book meme!

What a weird list. It's like a mixture of the basic college canon and the best sellers from a few years ago. And what's with the repetitions: the complete works of Shakespeare and Hamlet, the Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe? Anyway, I managed a meager fifteen.

Wow. What a cool idea. P.S. You need to read Catcher in the Rye, stat.

I've seen this list before & it grosses me out. I heard somewhere that it was from one of those book-blogging sites? Some of the books are great, others of them are just insulting bestsellers. I get out with 22, 1 unfinished, but really, most of them are things I'd avoid rather than gaps.

What? No Owen Meany? Put that on top of Kite Runner and place on the top of your pile....

This is what always happens with these lists - people get freaked out that you haven't read something or other quite profound, and that your life is incomplete. Sigh. ;)

I have no doubt you're right and I should read Owen Meany and Catcher in the Rye, but geez, life is so short. . . I can barely plow through a book a month. And you should see my to-read pile already. . . I know, you don't have any sympathy for my excuses, do you? ;)

I would fill out the list but my showing has been utterly pitiful. I think I just might construct a list of the 100 books that I've read that I have enjoyed most/found most important.

Laelaps - seriously, you should start a new meme: if not the top 100 books, maybe even the top 10? It would say a lot about people - more than this list does!

Maybe I will.... 100 might be a bit much, it's true. Once I got past 50 it would probably only say "These are books in my library." I will comment here when I've got everything together.

"14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Oh, come on. How many people have read "Two Gentlemen of Verona?""

::raises hand::

I haven't read most of the histories, though... they're just not as fun as his other plays. So I haven't actually read the Complete Works, but I think I've read nearly all of the tragedies and comedies.

I did this meme (or a similar version) a while ago but didn't count how many I'd actually read...

Cool Meme, Jess. Thanks for tagging me.

52 read, 11 partially read, several I've been meaning to read. I did a lot of the reading when I was a kid and reading a book a day, though.

I agree with a couple of your commenters, it's an oddly assorted list of books.

I did a quick run-through and concluded that I have read between 44 and 52 of them--though both numbers include two duplicates (Hamlet and Shakespeare's works; The Lion etc and Chronicles of Narnia). I agree with John McKay above that this is a weird list. Several of them are favorites of mine: Cold Comfort Farm (!), Alice's Adventures, Emma. There are at least two that I detest: Lord of the Flies and Gone with the Wind. "Books" like the complete works of Shakespeare, the Bible, or the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes are puzzling--are we to include Edward III and The Passionate Pilgrim (Shakespeare), Judith and Enoch (the Bible), all Sherlock Holmes stories or just the twelve in the Adventures of Sherlock Holmes? As it happens I'm covered on each of those no matter how you count, having gone through periods of enthusiasm for Shakespeare, the Bible, and Sherlock Holmes in my youth. I am assuming, however, that Dune means only the book by that title (which I have read), not the various sequels (which I haven't).

Far from hounding you about the holes in your literary background, I would like to volunteer that it makes me happy to see some of the things that you've obviously chosen to pass up. I find it especially satisfying that you apparently never picked up The Bell Jar, despite that fact that you've read far more poetry (from the past 100 years, at least) than I have. There have been many moments when I've felt that I should give Sylvia Plath a shot, but every time I see one of her poems in isolation somewhere, I think, "Nah."

Yes, I think that anyone who has read more than six books on this list has a bone to pick with A) the duplicates, B) the poorly defined collective entries, and C) the content of the list itself. . .

The thing is, it's an arbitrary list. One could have a very good education without having read more than a handful of books on this list. Consider the following: Oedipus, The Aeneid, Beowulf, The Canterbury Tales, Ivanhoe, The Scarlet Letter, Bartleby the Scrivener, The Age of Innocence, The Turn of the Screw, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Sun Also Rises, This Side of Paradise, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, The Metamorphosis, Notes From Underground, The Daughter of Time, The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Call of the Wild, Cold Mountain, I Capture the Castle, The End of the Affair, V, Watership Down, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, The Name of the Rose, A Wrinkle in Time, Stranger in a Strange Land, Love Medicine, Flowers for Algernon, The Wizard of Oz . . .?

I may have made a boo boo or two, but I think that's thirty more reasonable prospects not on the original list that I've also read.

Yay that there are so many good books in the world.

I wonder if Ulysses is ever not italicized? People who have actually read James Joyce scare me.

Done.

You need to read Midnight's Children. Seriously.

HJ

Not a problem - I'm reading Midnight's Children now for book club next month. But I haven't finished it, nor started and abandoned it, so it didn't get bolded or italicized. :)