This post is second in a series analyzing my own connection with the “top 100 books the UK can’t live without” (pdf). In a previous post, I discussed books 91-100. In this post, I will examine books 81-90.

90. The Faraway Tree Collection by Enid Blyton.

I confess I’ve not heard of this book.

89. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle

Now this one, I love. My sister gave me the complete collection with four novels for Christmas. I read all of the Sherlock Holmes tales, with the exception of The Hound of the Baskervilles, in one summer. I love them. I love the glimpse into Victorian Britain they provide. I love the fact that after you read them for a time, you can begin to think like Holmes and solve the mysteries. I love the characters. What great stories.

88. The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom.

I must be the last person around not to have read this, but I haven’t. I have heard nothing but good things about it, but these sorts of books just don’t grab me.

87. Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White

This book is the reason I still can’t kill spiders and why I feel bad when I do kill them by accident. I loved The Trumpet of the Swan, too, but I never read Stuart Little. Conventional wisdom in modern children’s writing is that one doesn’t use anthropomorphic animals to tell stories. I guess that’s now passé. If that’s so, then why do so many kids love E.B. White? I haven’t seen the new movie based on this book, but I want to. I loved this book when I was a kid.

86. A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry.

I haven’t heard of this one.

85. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

I haven’t read this one, but it’s on my list. You know, the one that grows ever longer and makes me despair of ever finishing. But I suppose finishing the list would leave me empty and sad. I have a curriculum guide at school that pairs this novel with Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, which makes me think I’d like Bovary a lot. Also, I really enjoyed Madame Bovary’s Ovaries.

84. The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro.

Another one on my list.

83. The Color Purple by Alice Walker.

One of my most beloved novels. I can never fail to cry when Celie is reunited with her children. I love Celie. Who wouldn’t? After being pushed down her entire life, she learns love herself. One of my favorite scenes in the book ( which was cut from the movie) was the scene in which Celie and Mr. ____________ are sitting together on the porch making pants, able at last to make peace with all that came before, and Mr. ___________ asks Celie to remarry him. “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don’t notice it.”

82. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell.

Haven’t heard of this one.

81. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.

Did Dickens invent the way we see Christmas? I personally think he did. What a great story. I love the ghosts. I have to see some version of this every Christmas, or my Christmas doesn’t feel complete. My favorite is the version starring Patrick Stewart.

Stay tuned for 79-80 and more to come.

[tags]World Book Day, literature, reading[/tags]

My friend Roger recently wrote about World Book Day in the UK. In America, we celebrate “Read Across America,” which seems to be much like World Book Day in that it is aimed toward children. It is celebrated on March 2, which was beloved children’s author Dr. Seuss’s birthday. My daughter Maggie was encouraged to bring a Dr. Seuss book to school and to wear a Cat in the Hat hat if she had one. It turns out she didn’t need one, as the students made one in school. A few of the students at my own school dressed up as Dr. Seuss characters for our Purim festivities yesterday.

Maybe I missed it, but I didn’t see a list of Books Americans Can’t Live Without, and perhaps I shudder to think what sort of dreck might be on such a list, so I am co-opting the list produced by the British public. It is my intention to discuss each of the top 100 books on the list — if I have read them — in a series of posts. At any rate, it should give me something to write about for a time. I will begin with the bottom 10, 91-100, and work my way to the top ten.

100. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo.

I have never read this book. I might read it some time, but I confess it isn’t high on my pile of books I feel like I should get to. Perhaps I will try it through DailyLit.com.

99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

I read this book as a child, and I remember really enjoying it. I must have, as it was the first of Roald Dahl’s books that I read and I subsequently read Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and James and the Giant Peach. I distinctly remember feeling the book had been shortchanged in the creepy 1971 movie based upon it.

98. Hamlet by William Shakespeare.

You know this is a British list, that’s for sure. I’m not sure Americans would think to put such works of literature on their lists. I love this play. Of course, it is one of Shakespeare’s most famous and includes perhaps the most famous soliloquy in all of literature (“To be or not to be…”). This one should be higher on the list.

97. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas.

I have read The Count of Monte Cristo, but I haven’t read this one yet. It’s on my list. Dumas had a gift for a great adventure story.

96. A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute.

I have heard of it, but never read it.

95. A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole.

I first heard of this book when I was in college. It came up for discussion many times in my Dialectology class — a class I took to meet a language class requirement for my major. It was an interesting class. I took three years off from college between my junior and senior years. I got married, had my oldest daughter Sarah, and was a stay-at-home-mom. I got a library card and checked out A Confederacy of Dunces largely based upon how much everyone in the Dialectology class talked about it. I loved it. It was a hilarious book, but sad, too. Toole committed suicide some eleven years before the book was published, and his mother worked tirelessly to bring it into print. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.

94. Watership Down by Richard Adams.

This is another one I’ve never read, though I have a copy on my bookshelf at school. I have heard a lot of people say they loved it, but for some reason the premise behind it never appealed to me.

93. The Wasp Factory by Iain Banks.

I confess I’ve never heard of this one.

92. The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint-Exupéry.

I have never read this one all the way through, but I tried to read it in French in high school. Alas, my three years of high school French didn’t prepare me for reading a whole children’s book in French, so I abandoned the cause and never took it up again. One of my colleagues cherishes this book a great deal, and I have thought several times over the last year or so that I ought to pick up the English version and just read it.

91. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.

I wrote about this book last year when I read it for the second time, this time with a more open, mature, prepared mind. I didn’t care for it at all when I read it in college, but I really enjoyed it last year.

[tags]World Book Day, literature, reading[/tags]

This one looks fun (via the Classical Bookworm). Here is how it works:

• Books I’ve read
• Books I want to read
• Books I wouldn’t touch with a 10-foot pole
• Books on my bookshelves
• ? Books I’ve never heard of
• # Books I’ve seen in movie or TV form
• ! Books I’ve blogged about
• Books I’m indifferent to

1. ! The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. #! Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. #! To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. #! Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) (Lara took my copy!)
5. #! The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. #! The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. #! The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. ! Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. ? A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. #! Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. #! Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. #! Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. ? Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. # The Stand (Stephen King)
19. #! Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. ! Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. #! The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. ! The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. # Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. # The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (George Orwell)
35. #! The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. ? The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. ? The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. ? The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. ? Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. ! Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. #! The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. ! Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt) (tried it; too depressing)
49. # The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. ! The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. #! The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. ? The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. #! Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. #! The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. ! The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveler’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. #! Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. ? Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) (tried to read in French, but didn’t get far)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. ? The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. ? The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. # Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. ? Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. # Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. ? Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. ? The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. ? Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. ? Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. ? In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. # Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. # The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

[tags]literature, book, meme[/tags]