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[kbk]

it's a good thing I copied this to the clipboard, because lj ate it. for the second time:

what the hell is going on with lj right now? the colours! are... are... the bland colours of defaultiness! what happened to my black?! *sobs*

um. yes. anyway.


Have read the ones in bold. At least, I think I have. Hmm. I mean, remembering them is another thing entirely, but...

1984, George Orwell
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures In Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Animal Farm, George Orwell
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy - I have it at home and have been meaning to read it for ages, but I guess that doesn't count
Anne Of Green Gables, LM Montgomery
Artemis Fowl, Eoin Colfer
The BFG, Roald Dahl
Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell
Bleak House, Charles Dickens
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley - um... I might have, if it's the one I'm thinking of, but I don't think it is.
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Bridget Jones's Diary, Helen Fielding
Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
Catch 22, Joseph Heller
The Catcher In The Rye, JD Salinger
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
The Clan Of The Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
The Colour Of Magic, Terry Pratchett
The Count Of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas
Crime And Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Double Act, Jacqueline Wilson
Dune, Frank Herbert
Emma, Jane Austen
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Girls In Love, Jacqueline Wilson
The God Of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
The Godfather, Mario Puzo
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman
Goodnight Mister Tom, Michelle Magorian
Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
The Grapes Of Wrath, John Steinbeck - haven't I? could have sworn...
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby, F Scott Fitzgerald
Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone, JK Rowling
Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban, JK Rowling
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Holes, Louis Sachar
I Capture The Castle, Dodie Smith
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Kane And Abel, Jeffrey Archer
Katherine, Anya Seton
The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, CS Lewis
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Lord Of The Flies, William Golding
The Lord Of The Rings, JRR Tolkien
Love In The Time Of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Magic Faraway Tree, Enid Blyton
Magician, Raymond E Feist
The Magus, John Fowles
Matilda, Roald Dahl
Memoirs Of A Geisha, Arthur Golden - haven't I? I... damn
Middlemarch, George Eliot
Midnight's Children, Salman Rushdie
Mort, Terry Pratchett
Night Watch, Terry Pratchett
Noughts And Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice And Men, John Steinbeck - I'm sure I have, but I'm damned if I could tell you about it.
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
One Hundred Years Of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Perfume, Patrick Suskind
Persuasion, Jane Austen
The Pillars Of The Earth, Ken Follett
A Prayer For Owen Meany, John Irving
Pride And Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Princess Diaries, Meg Cabot
The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressell
Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Shell Seekers, Rosamunde Pilcher
The Stand, Stephen King
The Story Of Tracy Beaker, Jacqueline Wilson
A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth
Swallows And Amazons, Arthur Ransome
A Tale Of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
Tess Of The D'urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCollough
To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee
A Town Like Alice, Nevil Shute
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson
The Twits, Roald Dahl
Ulysses, James Joyce
Vicky Angel, Jacqueline Wilson
War And Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Watership Down, Richard Adams
The Wind In The Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Winnie-the-Pooh, AA Milne
The Woman In White, Wilkie Collins
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte


Fifty-five, if I counted right and I can trust my memory.


And out of the ones I haven't, there are a few that I'd rather not - I mean, The Princess Diaries, if that's the one I'm thinking of, isn't the internal message that you have to become beautiful and mannered and etc to be worth anything?

Um. Yes. Anyway.

Of the ones I've read, my favourite is probably Catch-22 (the funny, and the sick, and the brain-twistiness, and I fell in love with Yossarian - the sequel is bullshit, though), though there are others I love, like Good Omens (look at the authors, and the subject matter. and the funny, and the slashy, and...) and Crime and Punishment (oh, Rodya. dear Rodya. and the bleakness of it. yum). And I have copies of those three with me right now, though GO is borrowed.

Midnight's Children I remember as something definitely worth reading, twisty and a bit scary and detailed - I probably missed most of the allegorical stuff as I read it a couple of years ago, but still.

Of the children's books, Anne of Green Gables is the one I remember as a childhood book, though I was a voracious reader - still am, though right now I'm mostly on fanfic - and I made my way through a large portion of the village library. Anne was the sort of girl you always wanted to be. I read all the sequels, too, and they have this sort of old-worldliness to them that's just sweet. Same goes for Little Women - I wanted to be Jo, of course. Actually, interesting discussion with somebody - sister? - about how revolutionary Louisa May Alcott was, in her day, because of the general equality of marriages in the books, the fact that Jo keeps working and Baer is in a caring role as well... apparently it was quite controversial, which is odd now because her books are generally thought of as, well, sweet and old-fashioned. Oh, and The Secret Garden - I loved that. Read a whole lot of Enid Blyton, too, though I was never quite so enthusiastic about that - they were all so jolly. Oh, was The Tree That Sat Down hers? Because I remember loving that - all slow and heartwarming.

Captain Corelli's Mandolin - haven't seen the film, don't want to because from what I've heard, boy does it fuck with the book. Lovely descriptiveness and melancholy.

All the random Brontes and Austens are, again, from when I was younger and nicked every book off my sisters' shelves, because those are the sorts of books that you have in the house because they were given to your mother or something like that, and the general style of them is something that's oddly suitable for an unsociable little girl with dreams of romance.

Terry Pratchett yay! same goes for JKR, I suppose, though... gah. I don't know if I can count her as a credible author when all she's done is this one series and she doesn't seem to have any sense of proportion about it now and all the fic-time I've been putting in is pointing out more and more things about the books that I'm just not entirely happy with... I mean, when I get OoTP I'll sit down and read it straight through just like I did with GoF, but still...

The Dark Materials trilogy I read not long ago, all in one go, and while I liked them and there were some nice concepts and a few parts I just loved, I wasn't entirely happy with them, there was some structural stuff, some overt pushing of the atheism... I think if I'd been younger I would have loved them, because I adored Narnia and I didn't 'get' the Christianity until much later. Of course, I actually preferred the Llyr books - especially Taran Wanderer, oddly enough, though I wanted to be Eilonwy and of course she wasn't really in that one... Ooh, cognitive dissonance - our copy of The High King had a still from the Disney as the front cover, and that showed Taran as a young boy, and of course that's the last book in the series and by then he was a man - probably no more than seventeen time-line-wise, but he was an adult.

Ulysses and War and Peace were vanity projects a few years ago. I read them because they were big and scary and there to be read, and that's about all there is to it.

I preferred 1984 to Animal Farm, probably because I'm not comfortable with allegory and also because I first read 1984 when I was older. The bleakness of it suited me at the time, the vision of society stuck with me for quite a while.

Lord of The Flies and To Kill A Mockingbird I read for school (though nobody else read TKAM - we were given it over the summer, came back, got reassigned since nobody bothered) and I'm glad of our English syllabus simply because of that. They're both powerful books. I think perhaps LOTF is a better book to assign teenagers because, hello, bloodthirsty brats. Seriously, more thought needs to go into these things, because if you tell a thirteen-year-old (who isn't the way I was back then) that you're giving them a classic book and an allegory of human nature, they're not going to be interested. Tell them it's a bunch of kids stranded on a desert island who form tribes and kill stuff and fight, maybe you'll get some reaction. Grr.

Um... hey, where's the Agatha Christie? I read a ton of that at one point.

Alice is a total classic, and absolutely drug-induced besides. Was it him that did Sylvie and Bruno as well? I seem to remember a collected works, but it might have been somebody else. Mental, anyway.

The Wind in the Willows is, I don't know... simple but beautiful. The sort of thing you would happily read as a bedtime story for your own kids.

Hey, again! Just-So Stories! I loved them!

I'm being a bit enthusiastic, here, aren't I? OK, I'll stop now.


Had second exam today, was a reasonable exam but I hadn't learned enough for it but I think I still passed, which is good.

Oh, oh, oh... the book I meant to mention in the first place.

On The Road. I got drunk on that book, on the writing and the story and the people. Seriously. I read it one day and spent the rest of the week wandering around in a daze. Drunk on it.

I do that with poetry, sometimes. I got a book of poetry for my birthday - A Responsibility to Awe, by Rebecca Elson - and I was just out of it for days on end. Fantastic.

OK, really stopping this time.

Comments

[wishfulaces.livejournal.com]

Okay, so maybe my sibs and mum have a point when they tell me my education is lacking...I haven't read a *lot* of those books. Most of them, in fact. Damn.

L.M. Montgomery was one of those authors I read as a kid, too, and then on a whim I went back and read some of the later Anne books this summer--it was a shock the different viewpoint I had on them (though it probably shouldn't have been) and ever since I've been wanting to do some kind of literary/history project on some of the ideas/themes I saw coming up in those books...

And I read Les Miz for the whole "big and scary" idea--only it was just dull. My sister would probably have my hide for saying that.

Though I keep saying tv can make you read, too--I wouldn't have read Dicken's Our Mutual Friend if not for the version I saw, nor the Horatio Hornblower books (okay, so it's all Paul McGann's fault) or Flowers for Algernon (even the musical didn't make me feel like reading the book).