A bookish tag.

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N’s blog has what you call a highly off-beat feel. Unlike most pretentious bloggers, she doesn’t blog for publicity and traffic. She blogs for herself and that’s why I always enjoy reading her posts. There’s always something very very familiar about her writing and it’s always good to read that to break from all the hype that is popularity-blogging.

So I’ve picked up a tag from her and although I’d promised J that I’d be doing a tag on creepy spammers on this blog, I’m actually more psyched to do this one.

Yes, I can be a nerd and I love it.

So anyway. The tag has it that BBC has released this booklist which has the top books out of which they believe people will have only read about.. six. Yes. So the tag is…

Copy the list to your blog and print in bold the books you’ve read. N’s added a nifty bit of commentary next to each book she’s read (and her score’s impressive to boot!) and I’m gonna do the same.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen (x)  … a girl who hasn’t read Austen isn’t a girl.
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien (x) … took me a whole WEEK to finish it!
3. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte (x) … been there, read it.
4. Harry Potter series – JK Rowling (x) … oh sigh, sigh, sigh.
5. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee (x)  … the bible for all ethics.
6. The Bible .. my mian has a copy. One of these days I just might.
7. Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte (x)
8. Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell … one of those books I’ve always promised myself I’d read.
9. His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens (x) … one of the first non-abridged books I’ve read. Tough, delicious text.
11. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott (x) … the must-read for all little women. God, I kill myself.
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy … someone tried to FORCE me into reading it. I told her I’d read Far from the Madding Crowd first.
13. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare … do incomplete works count? I still can’t believe I haven’t read Macbeth.
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien (x) … took me two days to read it. LotR was MUCH better.
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch – George Eliot (x) … Eliot rocks. And how cool is she to have GEORGE as her first name?!
21. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell (x) … the movie was cooler because of Clark Gable. “Frankly, m’dear I don’t give a damn!” … oh sigh.
22. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald (x) … one intense book. The first time I heard about it though was from Archie Comics. lol. The second time I saw a documentary about it (see, told you I was a nerd!) on the History Channel.
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy … it’s sitting in my bookshelf. One of the many books I couldn’t bring to Sana’a.
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky … it’s sitting in the bookshelf in Sana’a.
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll (x) … Cabbages and kings!
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame (x) … aah, gone are the days of childhood. And does anyone remember the series that STN used to show? Or was that PTV? At 11 in the morning?
31. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34. Emma – Jane Austen (x) … Austen’s powers of dissecting the female mind never cease to amaze me and bore the husband.
35. Persuasion – Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini … after a friend told me she cried for a whole day after reading it .. I decided I’m better off not reading it.
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres … waitaminit! This whole list is based on movies!
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden (x) … book much better the movie.
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41. Animal Farm – George Orwell 
42. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown … oh never, please. Tom Hanks, WHY did you have to go ahead and do those movies?!
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez (x) … okay, so does anyone else wonder why Marquez has a passion for the erotica of the elderly?
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables -  LM Montgomery (x) … read em all cover to cover a million times. I heart Anne Shirley.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy (x) … I don’t care what anyone says. I could never like Bathsheba. She was a bitch!
48. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood … sigh. also sitting in the bookshelf back home.
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 (x)
55. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon (x) … actually pretty interesting.
57. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens (x)
58. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon.
60. Love in the Time of Cholera -  Gabriel Garcia Marquez  (x)
61. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov (x) … beautiful prose, scandalous plot.
63. The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas (x)
66. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jone’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie … Rushdie’s a magician with words. An ass to all Muslims but a magician nonetheless.
70. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens (x)
72. Dracula – Bram Stoker (x)
73. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett (x)
74. Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses – James Joyce … one of the first books-slash-gifts I received from B.
76. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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)
82. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
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 (x) … childhood love. “Up above on the Faraway Tree! Jo, Bessie, Fannie and me!”
91. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94. Watership Down – Richard Adams
95. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98. Hamlet – William Shakespeare (x) … Something stinks in the state of Denmark. It’s probably his Oedipus complex. Sigh. The number of times we had to refer to Hamlet for our Psychoanalysis course is ridiculous!
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl  (x) … Roald Dahl is a genius. I wish I could write like him.
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Okay, so I got a very average score of 32. Fellow nerds, step up to the plate and beat me, will you!

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