Janene Renee

Being sick is one of the most boring things on the planet.  There's just only so much orange juice, bathroom trips, couch cuddles, naps, and movies I can stand before I am ready to go crazy.  This is what I appreciate the laptop, so I can answer silly quizzes like this.

This is quite an interesting book list!  I actually own lots of the books off this list, but just haven't read them.  Some I even started, but never did finish.  Many of them I've read only because they were school requirements, but I'm glad they were because I never would have read them otherwise.  From reading these books in high school, I developed a love for what I call "classically written" literature.  I just love how they can say a whole paragraph's worth of a message in just one well written sentence.  No one talks like that anymore.  Not that I think they should, but on the other hand, I do believe that there are a lot of fantastic vocabulary words out there that are sorely neglected. 

I still remember the feeling I had when I finally understood how to read these kinds of books, with all their big words, mixed up sentences, and especially Shakespeare.  It was thanks mostly to my 9th grade English teacher, Mr. Baugh.  It's like every day in class, he's just come over and turn on a bunch of light bulbs over my head, making things suddenly make sense.  Whole new worlds opened up!  Suddenly, there was no reason why I couldn't memorizes 50 vocabulary words and their meanings!  I knew how to insult someone in Shakespearean!  I knew what a gerund was, and why it mattered!  He even introduced me to Marc Cohen's music, which I still love to this day.  I don't remember tons about high school, I have a poor memory that way, but I DO remember Mr. Baugh and his English class.

Anyway, on to the silly quiz….

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books on this list.

Look at the list and put an "X" by those you have read.

x 1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
X 2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
x 3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
x 4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
X 5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I don't think I've actually read the whole thing, so I'm not counting it)
x 7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

Subtotal: 6

x 11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I have read about 2/3 of it, but not the "complete")
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
X 16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
X 18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

Subtotal:3

x 21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
X 22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
x 24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
X 28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
x 29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

Subtotal: 5

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
x 33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
X 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
x 40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne

Subtotal: 3

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
x 46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
X 49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan

Subtotal: 2

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
x 52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
x 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
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Subtotal: 2

X 61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
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
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville

Subtotal: 7

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
x 73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce (I have made it about halfway through, will tackle it one of these days!)
76 The Inferno – Dante
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Subtotal: 1

80 Possession – AS Byatt
x 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 – R. Mistry
x 87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
x 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton

Subtotal: 3

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince (Le Petit 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
X 98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
x 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
x 100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Subtotal: 3

Total: 35