Book meme

[tvordlj]

Snagged from a few, dyddgu most recently. I find books to be similar to movies in that the critically acclaimed ones, the "classics" especially, are not ones that i've every really enjoyed reading though a few have been quite good. You're always told authors like Dickens is a "must read" and i can't stand him. I find the language too difficult to read. Some of the "classic" authors have good stories but their writing style is difficult. Henry James is one of these. I liked Wings of a Dove but it's very hard to read. Jane Austen is easy to read and has good stories and i was pleasantly surprised that Vanity Fair was easy to read as well. Shakespeare is harder to read but i do enjoy watching it on stage or film. It's easier to get the gist of what he's saying if the words are unfamiliar if you can hear how they're spoken and "acted"...body language and intonation.

Apparently you are supposed to bold the ones you've read and italicize the ones you own but have not read. I don't buy a book unless i intend to read it or at least try it. Most books i can finish. Occasionally i can't get through one. The ones i've bolded are ones i've at least started. I've added to the meme, with a star beside the ones I finished and two for ones I actually liked a lot. Most that i've finished i liked well enough to finish so you can take that as a given.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell - couldn't get through it
**Anna Karenina - school
*Crime and Punishment - school
*Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
*Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
**Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
*Madame Bovary - didn't like it but had to finish it for school
The Odyssey
*Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel War and Peace
**Vanity Fair
**The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
*Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
*Atlas Shrugged
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
*Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales - in the original.
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
*Brave New World
**The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
**A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
**The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
*1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
**Sense and Sensibility
**The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
*Tess of the D’Urbervilles - again, school
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
**Les Misérables - read recently. I liked the dialogue bits but he doesn't half go on and on with descriptions
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
*Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
*Angela’s Ashes : a memoir - but didn't like it. depressing
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
*Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere - does the graphic novel count?!
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
*The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
**The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
**Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
**White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers