15 posts tagged “books”

Where have I been?

Another fun book survey!

1) What author do you own the most books by?
I am going to guess Jane Austen...yeah, it's gotta be her.

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
The Complete Works of Shakespeare or Catcher in the Rye

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
Yes. 

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Mr. Rochester from Jane Eyre

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
Catcher, easily.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
James and the Giant Peach

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year?
I usually don't finish the bad ones. 

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year?
Gentleman and Players

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
Everyone should have read Catcher in the Rye at some point in their life.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Jonathan Franzen

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
Gentleman and Players or The Corrections

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Something I stopped reading because it was bad.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I had a dream that I wrote a book and got a huge advance.

14) What is the most lowbrow book you've read as an adult?
Hmmm...I suppose Nicholas Sparks could be lowbrow, but Nora Roberts is pretty lowbrow too.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read?
Crime and Punishment.  Awful.

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen?
O, which is a modern Othello.  Also liked it very much.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Oh God, I would much rather read the French, and I hate the French.

18) Roth or Updike?
Roth.  Definitely.

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Sedaris.  Hilarious.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
That's a really hard one for me.  I LOVE Shakespeare, but The Canterbury Tales was one of my all time favorites...gonna go with Will Shakespeare on this one.

21) Austen or Eliot?
Austen.  All the way.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
The Babysitters' Club series.  Ugh.  But I was in 4th grade!  The most embarrassing gap (literally) in my reading is right now...since I finished the M.A., all I've wanted to do is watch Bobby Flay puree things.

23) What is your favorite novel?
Well, Catcher in the Rye, if you hadn't noticed.

24) Play?
Medea or Hamlet

25) Poem?
Anything by Frost, Auden, Whitman or Shakespeare

26) Essay?
All of Harold Bloom's

27) Short story?
Oh, such a great category!  "The Yellow Wallpaper" (Gilman) or "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (O'Connor) and "The Killers" (Hemingway) and "The Laughing Man" (Salinger).

28) Work of non-fiction?
Anything about Thomas Jefferson

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Hemingway

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Dan Brown

31) What is your desert island book?
The Bible

32) And ... what are you reading right now?
Word Freak--it's about competitive Scrabble Players

Who Loves You?

Thanks, Cori, for the time-killer:)

1) Green: I have read.
2) Blue: Those I intend to read.
3) Underline: Books I love.
4) Strike out the books you have no intention of ever reading, or were forced to read at school and hated.
5) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

6) I'm going to add a step - gray out those you are unfamiliar with.

 
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 The Harry Potter Series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Phillip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (I own)
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 (I own)
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I own & have started and put down)
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I own)
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
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
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I own)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov (I own)
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 (I own)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville --Easily in my top 10!
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons
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
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
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 St. Exupery --I even read it in French!
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole (I own)
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Question: wouldn't this fall under his "Complete Works"? It's not like it's "The Complete Works of Shakespeare...oh, and Hamlet.")
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

I've read 52 on the list.  Yay.  I will never touch another Charles Dickens in my life, and there are still many other "classics" not on this list that I have read or will read. 

Love

HOW DID I NEVER READ THIS BOOK EARLIER???

So beautiful:

"My future husband was becoming to me my whole world; and more than the world; almost my hope of heaven. He stood between me and every thought of religion, as an eclipse intervenes between man and the broad sun. I could not, in those days, see God for his creation of whom I had made an idol."