Here's the first, off Minerva, who in turn got it off
Off we go then !!
THE BBC BOOK MEME
Apparently, the BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of the books listed below. Here are the rules:
1) Look at the list and put an �X� after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests.
I've tweaked the concept a bit by adding extra x's depending on how much I like the books....
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen � x (I was very young ,can�t be blamed)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien � xx (The phrase �well-thumbed copy� is an understatement)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte � x (The perfect mix of Gothic and sappy)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling � xx (Potterhead to the core, I can still remember the 8-hour marathon reads when the new ones came out)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee � xx (A book that�s funny, moving and makes you think of Gregory Peck, my idea of heaven!)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell � x (Thoughtcrime doesn�t entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death!)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens � x ( I prefer the original, starker ending to the revised, happier one)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott � x (The 1933 movie version, with Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, like totally rules)
12 Tess of the D�Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller �("I�m not ashamed,� Yossarian said. �I�m just afraid.")
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - + (Does 70% count?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier � xx (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Larry Olivier as Maxim, Joan Fontaine as the 2nd Mr. Winter and the spine-tinglingly good Judith Anderson as the housekeeper; the 1940 movie trumps the book)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien � xx (Probably the most fruitful purchase of my life,The Hobbit,The Lord Of The Rings and the first two Potters � all for 600 rupees in 2001)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger �x (Seems a lot less depressing at each subsequent re-read)
19 The Time Traveler�s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell � (Does the movie count? I don�t think so)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald � xx (The Jazz Age in it�s greatest interpretation, read with Louis Armstrong playing �Tiger Rag� in the background)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy � x (Exhausting, but oh-so-very rewarding)
25 The Hitch Hiker�s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams � xxx (Oh fruddled Gruntbuggly, thy micturitions are to me�; Genius!!!)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky � x (Who hasn�t identified with Raskolnikov at least once in their life)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck � xx (The mind-numbingly stark beauty of the book is brilliantly equalled by John Ford�s masterly film version)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll � x (�and�Through The Looking Glass�, who needs LSD when you�ve got Alice)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame � x (What an utterly brilliant children�s book, and what an utterly brilliant TV show)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy �x (Gets more depressing with each subsequent re-read)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens � x (Dickens� de-facto autobiography)
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 � x (Doesn�t make up for the fact that Milne was, to put it lightly, a twit!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell � xx (The book I�ve got 20 copies of, to distribute among random strangers)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown � x (I apologize. In the words of Stephen Fry,� Complete loose-stool-water.
Arse-gravy of the very worst kind.�)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez � xxx (I read it when I was 15, way too young for it. Thankfully I�ve never completely recovered)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins � x (A personal milestone, the first book I ever pinched from a library!)
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 � x (Brilliant, but everyone I�ve recommended it to seems to hate it)
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 � x (I seem to have read a lot of Dickens, lucky me!!)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley � x (One of my prize possessions, a First Edition from 1932)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon � x (Heard it as a play on the BBC, read it 4 years later.)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez � x (With characters named �Saint-Amour� and �Escolastica�, I was hooked before I began)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov � (Even if Kubrick,Peter Sellers and James Mason hadn�t done wonders with it, it would still have been brilliant)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas � x (Revenge is sweet)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac � xx (Liberating like nothing else I've ever read)
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 (The Great American Novel)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens � x (Slightly anti-Semitic, but Fagan is teh man!!)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker � x (I never drink . . . wine)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce � x (Joyce took the English novel and split its head open. Thank heavens for that)
76 The Inferno � Dante � x (I wonder which circle of Hell Machiavelli would�ve been in)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens � x (What can I say�..)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro � x (The dark side of the Wodehouse world, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins straining to do their characters justice)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert � x (anyone who wants to know what a perfect sentence reads like MUST read Bovary, and take notes)
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 � xx (The Complete Illustrated Collection, awesomeness!!)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad � x ("The horror! The horror!")
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery � xxx (The greatest book written for children. Period.)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams � x (I can�t thank my folks enough for keeping me away from Enid Blyton and giving me Watership Down when I was 9)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole � xx (�My valve has closed� � brilliantness!)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas � x (Am I a perve, or are there serious homoerotic undertones in this book?)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare � xx (I finally found out where half of all the English quotations come from)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl � x (Screw political correctness, the Oompah-Loompahs RULE)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo � xxxx (Talk about reading the right book at the right time. I owe a lot to Jean Valjean, Threnardier and the Bishop)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien � xx (The phrase �well-thumbed copy� is an understatement)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte � x (The perfect mix of Gothic and sappy)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling � xx (Potterhead to the core, I can still remember the 8-hour marathon reads when the new ones came out)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee � xx (A book that�s funny, moving and makes you think of Gregory Peck, my idea of heaven!)
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell � x (Thoughtcrime doesn�t entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death!)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens � x ( I prefer the original, starker ending to the revised, happier one)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott � x (The 1933 movie version, with Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, like totally rules)
12 Tess of the D�Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller �("I�m not ashamed,� Yossarian said. �I�m just afraid.")
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - + (Does 70% count?)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier � xx (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Larry Olivier as Maxim, Joan Fontaine as the 2nd Mr. Winter and the spine-tinglingly good Judith Anderson as the housekeeper; the 1940 movie trumps the book)
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien � xx (Probably the most fruitful purchase of my life,The Hobbit,The Lord Of The Rings and the first two Potters � all for 600 rupees in 2001)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger �x (Seems a lot less depressing at each subsequent re-read)
19 The Time Traveler�s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell � (Does the movie count? I don�t think so)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald � xx (The Jazz Age in it�s greatest interpretation, read with Louis Armstrong playing �Tiger Rag� in the background)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy � x (Exhausting, but oh-so-very rewarding)
25 The Hitch Hiker�s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams � xxx (Oh fruddled Gruntbuggly, thy micturitions are to me�; Genius!!!)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky � x (Who hasn�t identified with Raskolnikov at least once in their life)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck � xx (The mind-numbingly stark beauty of the book is brilliantly equalled by John Ford�s masterly film version)
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll � x (�and�Through The Looking Glass�, who needs LSD when you�ve got Alice)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame � x (What an utterly brilliant children�s book, and what an utterly brilliant TV show)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy �x (Gets more depressing with each subsequent re-read)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens � x (Dickens� de-facto autobiography)
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 � x (Doesn�t make up for the fact that Milne was, to put it lightly, a twit!)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell � xx (The book I�ve got 20 copies of, to distribute among random strangers)
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown � x (I apologize. In the words of Stephen Fry,� Complete loose-stool-water.
Arse-gravy of the very worst kind.�)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez � xxx (I read it when I was 15, way too young for it. Thankfully I�ve never completely recovered)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins � x (A personal milestone, the first book I ever pinched from a library!)
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 � x (Brilliant, but everyone I�ve recommended it to seems to hate it)
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 � x (I seem to have read a lot of Dickens, lucky me!!)
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley � x (One of my prize possessions, a First Edition from 1932)
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon � x (Heard it as a play on the BBC, read it 4 years later.)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez � x (With characters named �Saint-Amour� and �Escolastica�, I was hooked before I began)
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov � (Even if Kubrick,Peter Sellers and James Mason hadn�t done wonders with it, it would still have been brilliant)
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas � x (Revenge is sweet)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac � xx (Liberating like nothing else I've ever read)
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 (The Great American Novel)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens � x (Slightly anti-Semitic, but Fagan is teh man!!)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker � x (I never drink . . . wine)
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -
75 Ulysses - James Joyce � x (Joyce took the English novel and split its head open. Thank heavens for that)
76 The Inferno � Dante � x (I wonder which circle of Hell Machiavelli would�ve been in)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome -
78 Germinal - Emile Zola -
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray -
80 Possession - AS Byatt -
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens � x (What can I say�..)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro � x (The dark side of the Wodehouse world, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins straining to do their characters justice)
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert � x (anyone who wants to know what a perfect sentence reads like MUST read Bovary, and take notes)
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 � xx (The Complete Illustrated Collection, awesomeness!!)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad � x ("The horror! The horror!")
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery � xxx (The greatest book written for children. Period.)
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams � x (I can�t thank my folks enough for keeping me away from Enid Blyton and giving me Watership Down when I was 9)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole � xx (�My valve has closed� � brilliantness!)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas � x (Am I a perve, or are there serious homoerotic undertones in this book?)
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare � xx (I finally found out where half of all the English quotations come from)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl � x (Screw political correctness, the Oompah-Loompahs RULE)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo � xxxx (Talk about reading the right book at the right time. I owe a lot to Jean Valjean, Threnardier and the Bishop)
My score : 52/100
Not bad, but there's things fundamentally wrong with the list above. No Wodehouse, no Vonnegut, no Updike, no Bellow, no Poe, and worse of all...no Mark Twain. I mean, come on !! wher's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?
Anyhoo, anyone who reads this is automatically tagged, but since that only includes me and a bicycle repairman named Majid, I think some affirmative tagging action is necessary.
Movies Of The Week ; The Hangover,District 9, Eraserhead,Blue Velvet
Music Of The Week, Zubeeda Khanum
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