Reader Harder List: 2018 Reading Challenge

Last year, Etudesque posted a book challenge list from PopSugar that I meant to update throughout the year and then managed to update all of twice. Whoops.

This year she's posted a list courtesy of Book Riot called Read Harder that I will attempt to remember this year. Or I'll do what I did before and forget about it until the last week in December.

1. A book published posthumously
2. A book of true crime
3. A classic of genre fiction (i.e., mystery, sci fi/fantasy, romance)

• And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie. It was a reread but STILL COUNTS

1. A comic written and illustrated by the same person
2. A book set in or about one of the five BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa)
3. A book about nature
4. A western
5. A comic written or illustrated by a person of color
6. A book of colonial or postcolonial literature
7. A romance novel by or about a person of color
8. A children's classic published before 1980
9. A celebrity memoir
10. An Oprah Book Club selection
11. A book of social science
12. A one-sitting book
13. A first book in a new-to-you YA or middle grade series
14. A sci-fi novel with a female protagonist by a female author
15. A comic that isn't published by Marvel, DC or Image
16. A book of genre fiction in translation
17. A book with a cover you hate
18. A mystery by a person of color or LGBTQ+ author
19. An essay anthology
20. A book with a female protagonist over the age of 60
21. An assigned book you hated (or never finished)

OK so, when I saw how short the list was I was thinking "Yeah, I got this." And then as I looked at it closer I realized "Shit, yeah, this IS gonna be hard." Hence the name, I suppose. 

Well, one down at least. Let's see how the rest of the year goes

I swear, I'll get around to writing another real review soon. Scout's honor and all that. 

2017 Reading Challenge - check in 2

So a hundred years ago (or like, April but really, 2017? Every week is at least a year) I snagged a Reading Challenge thing posted by Etudesque who grabbed it from PopSugar. I thought I'd update the list every couple months. How adorably optimistic of me. Instead I apparently started a draft for "check in 2" and then promptly forgot about it. #MyLifeStory

It's almost the end of the year so let's see where I'm at and how much I have to go to complete this by end of year. You know, something I will definitely be able to do.

1. A book recommended by a librarian
2. A book that's been on your TBR way too long
3. A book of letters
4. An audiobook
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
5. A book by a person of color
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
6. A book with one of the four seasons in the title
7. A book that is a story within a story
8. A book with multiple authors
9. An espionage thriller
10. A book with a cat on the cover
• We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby
11. A book by an author who uses a pseudonym
12. A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read
13. A book by or about a person who has a disability
14. A book involving travel
• All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai (time travel is travel, right?)
15. A book with a subtitle
• Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
16. A book that's published in 2017
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (released in Sept)
17. A book involving a mythical creature
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
18. A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
19. A book about food
• The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake by Aimee Bender
20. A book with career advice
• Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett
21. A book from a nonhuman perspective
• A Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman. Maybe? I mean, some of the characters are not human and we get their perspective. Right? Maybe
22. A steampunk novel
23. A book with a red spine
• I'm Judging You: The Do Better Manual by Luuvie Ajayi
24. A book set in the wilderness
• State of Wonder by Ann Patchett
25. A book you loved as a child
26. A book by an author from a country you've never visited
• Rich People Problems by Kevin Kwan (Singapore)
27. A book with a title that's a character's name
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
28. A novel set during wartime
• World War Z by Max Brooks
29. A book with an unreliable narrator
• Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino
30. A book with pictures
31. A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you
• The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
32. A book about an interesting woman
• Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise and Reign of the Unruly Women by Anne Helen Petersen
33. A book set in two different time periods
• Locke & Key by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez
34. A book with a month or day of the week in the title
• Atlanta Burns by Chuck Wendig
35. A book set in a hotel
36. A book written by someone you admire
• We Were Eight Years in Power by Ta-Nehisi Coates
37. A book that's becoming a movie in 2017
38. A book set around a holiday other than Christmas
39. The first book in a series you haven't read before
• John Dies in the End by David Wong
40. A book you bought on a trip
41. A book recommended by an author you love
42. A bestseller from 2016
• The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. At least, I assume it was a best seller.
43. A book with a family member term in the title
• The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin ('wives' count right?)
44. A book that takes place over a character's life span
• Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore
45. A book about an immigrant or refugee
46. A book from a genre/subgenre that you've never heard of
47. A book with an eccentric character
48. A book that's more than 800 pages
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
49. A book you got from a used book sale
50. A book that's been mentioned in another book
51. A book about a difficult topic
• White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America by Nancy Isenberg
52. A book based on mythology

So not that bad. 28. And there's still time, you never know. 

Halloween Reads!

This year I didn't actually do that much in the way of Halloween/scary reads. Maybe cos it's still crazy warm in the north east and thus it was harder to get into the Halloween spirit. Regardless, I don't have too much in the way of new Halloween reads, so I thought I'd do an update of a few old "Top Halloween Reads" posts I've done in the past. It's not unoriginal. It's a remix.

Now, in no particular order, other than the order I thought of them, here are my current favorite Halloween reads.

1. World War Z by Max Brooks A feature on all of the lists, as it deserves to be. It's great. It's scary. I love it.

2. Coraline by Neil Gaiman I am on the fence about Gaiman's adult books, but the ones for children are amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing. Other Mother is terrifying. Coraline is wonderful. And speaking of Gaiman's stuff for kids

3. The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman The Jungle Book, but in a graveyard. It's heartwarming and suspenseful and scary and weird.

4. Everything's Eventual by Stephen King Can't have a list like this without King on it. And this was basically my only scary read for the month because I love it so. Espeeeecially the story "1408". It's so creepy.

5. Misery by Stephen King He can be creepy even without the supernatural. Annie Wilkes is a force. A horrifying force.

6. N0S4A2 by Joe Hill Charles Manx is a GREAT villain, Vic McQueen is a great hero, this book is excellent.

7. Locke & Key by Joe Hill & Gabriel Rodriguez  I looooove this audiobook. Incredibly scary and the SUSPENSE

8. Horrorstor by Grady Hendrix Did you know an Ikea could be so scary? Because it CAN. He lures you in, makes you think it will just be some silly story. How could an Ikea (or really, an Ikea knock-off) be scary? But it can. It can.

9. My Best-Friend's Exorcism by Grady Hendrix While we're on the subject of Hendrix, we gotta mention this one. Again, he makes you think it won't be so scary but then it hits you. And so much of this is about female friendship, so that's swell.

10. Rosemary's Baby by Ira Levin Ah look, a classic. Who doesn't love a story of gas-lighting and devil worship?

11. Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story by Christopher Moore There can be funny Halloween reads as well, like Moore's story of vampire love.

12. Revenge: Eleven Dark Stories by Yoko Ogawa Another collection of short stories, and they are so unsettling.

13. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach Do you want to learn something from your Halloween read? Why not learn about what happens to dead bodies? Wouldn't that be fun?

So there you go. Lots to keep you up at night.

2017 Reading Challenge - check in 1

Etudesque posted about a PopSugar 2017 Reading Challenge checklist and I like lists so I thought perhaps I'd check in at the end of each quarter and see where I'm at. I'm not actually super concerned with checking things off this list, but hey, perhaps this will help with picking next read

1. A book recommended by a librarian
2. A book that's been on your TBR way too long
3. A book of letters
4. An audiobook
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah
5. A book by a person of color
• Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
6. A book with one of the four seasons in the title
7. A book that is a story within a story
8. A book with multiple authors
9. An espionage thriller
10. A book with a cat on the cover
11. A book by an author who uses a pseudonym
12. A bestseller from a genre you don't normally read
13. A book by or about a person who has a disability
14. A book involving travel
• All Our Wrong Todays by Elan Mastai (time travel is travel, right?)
15. A book with a subtitle
• Shrill: Notes from a Loud Woman by Lindy West
16. A book that's published in 2017
• Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jesmyn Ward (to be released in Sept I think)
17. A book involving a mythical creature
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J.K. Rowling
18. A book you've read before that never fails to make you smile
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
19. A book about food
20. A book with career advice
• Feminist Fight Club by Jessica Bennett
21. A book from a nonhuman perspective
22. A steampunk novel
23. A book with a red spine
24. A book set in the wilderness
25. A book you loved as a child
26. A book by an author from a country you've never visited
27. A book with a title that's a character's name
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J.K. Rowling
28. A novel set during wartime
29. A book with an unreliable narrator
30. A book with pictures
31. A book where the main character is a different ethnicity than you
• The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl by Issa Rae
32. A book about an interesting woman
33. A book set in two different time periods
34. A book with a month or day of the week in the title
35. A book set in a hotel
36. A book written by someone you admire
37. A book that's becoming a movie in 2017
38. A book set around a holiday other than Christmas
39. The first book in a series you haven't read before
• John Dies in the End by David Wong
40. A book you bought on a trip
41. A book recommended by an author you love
42. A bestseller from 2016
43. A book with a family member term in the title
• The Stepford Wives by Ira Levin ('wives' count right?)
44. A book that takes place over a character's life span
45. A book about an immigrant or refugee
46. A book from a genre/subgenre that you've never heard of
47. A book with an eccentric character
48. A book that's more than 800 pages
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J.K. Rowling
49. A book you got from a used book sale
50. A book that's been mentioned in another book
51. A book about a difficult topic
52. A book based on mythology

OK, 13 out of the 52. Let's see what the next few months bring.

Diversify Your Reading

Jenny over at Reading the End pulled together this list as part of a diversity in reading tag dealy with the following rules

The Diverse Books Tag is a bit like a scavenger hunt. I will task you to find a book that fits a specific criteria and you will have to show us a book you have read or want to read.
If you can’t think of a book that fits the specific category, then I encourage you to go look for one. A quick Google search will provide you with many books that will fit the bill. (Also, Goodreads lists are your friends.) Find one you are genuinely interested in reading and move on to the next category.
Everyone can do this tag, even people who don’t own or haven’t read any books that fit the descriptions below. So there’s no excuse! The purpose of the tag is to promote the kinds of books that may not get a lot of attention in the book blogging community.

So with that, let's take a look at some books that we should all check out to expand our horizons, shall we?

Find a book with a lesbian character
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel. Does it work if the work is nonfiction? And also a graphic novel? I assume so. Bechdel's memoir about coming to terms both with her  father's suicide and her own sexuality. But let's include The Hours by Michael Cunningham for good measure, which features 3 ladies in 3 different periods that are either possibly or most definitely gay.

Find a book with a Muslim protagonist
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson about a hacker in an unnamed country in the middle east. Deals with technology and religion and is a thriller and so good.

Find a book set in Latin America
When I Was Puerto Rican by Esmeralda Santiago is an autobiography about Santiago growing up first in rural Puerto Rico and later outside of San Juan before moving to Brooklyn.

Find a book about a person with a disability
Jenny said mental disorders count, so I'm going with Agorafabulous! by Sara Benincasa, which is a hilarious memoir about Benincasa's lift including her struggles with agoraphobia. Along those lines is Jenny Lawson's Furiously Happy which deals with her various struggles with mental illness and also hilarious

Find a science fiction or fantasy book with a POC protagonist
Octavia Butler's got you covered. Lilith's Brood/Xenogenisis trilogy. Or how about her  Patternmaster/Seed to Harvest series (though I haven't finished it)

Find a book set in (or about) any country in Africa
I am woefully ignorant when it comes to this selection (with the exception of ones like The Stranger and Heart of Darkness which feel like the wrong choice for this) so I checked Goodreads and came up with these books that are on my radar as ones I would LIKE to read, so let's go with Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie or Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe.

Find a book by an Aboriginal or Native American
Tracks by Louise Erdrich is a pre-blog book I read, so I don't remember a huge amount about it other than I enjoyed it but it was intense.

Find a book set in South Asia (Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, etc.)
I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai comes to mind. Another memoir/bio where she paints a picture of her life in her beloved home before being shot and winning all the awards.

Find a book with a biracial protagonist
Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell with titular park being white and Korean. I have tried finding books with China Rican characters, but thus far no dice. Tom's people are not well represented. (His response: "there are dozens of us!")

Find a book starring a transgender character or about transgender issues
This was another I had trouble coming up with on my own but THAT'S OK because the internet told me I should check out the book Supervillainz by Alice E. Goranson about "transgender superheroes struggling to make rent" while making "enemies to a pack of Capitalist superheroes".  Sounds like good times, no?

So everyone should do this and then we can get diversified in our reading and all will be awesome.

My library: A ramble

When we moved  to our new place, one of the biggest unpacking jobs was dealing with all the books. Because OMG SO MANY BOOKS

As I thought about it I was wondering exactly how many books. Particularly as I was unpacking and realized that between us Tom and I managed to acquire 4 different copies of the Odyssey.

That is too many copies. I wondered exactly what books do we have and since I heart spreadsheets I thought I'd catalogue all of the books we have.

The tally comes to:
522 paperbacks
116 ebooks
72 hardback
13 audiobooks
11 comics
6 graphic novels

Which sounds like the breakout I expected, if far more in each category than I would have guessed. Paperback is my preference, though ebooks are easy to tote around so that category has been growing. The comics are almost entirely Calvin & Hobbes collections, while more than half of the audiobooks are made up of the HP series, though I only have those as audiofiles instead of having an actual physical item, which makes moving nice.

because every other part of moving sucks

This list does not include some books we moved up to the attic, mostly old text books that we probably just should have gotten rid of except at the time we just wanted to get them out of the way and those boxes are heavy so they're probably going to stay right where they are.

Now that I have this in front of me, I was wondering who makes up the bulk of the work. Top authors (and authors is used sort of loosely, which will make sense given the list):

30 Shakespeare
19 The Mets
15 Christopher Moore
15 J.K. Rowling
13 Bill Bryson
13 Bill James
13 Stephen King
12 Jasper Fforde
11 Bill Watterson

Shakespeare wins and this just counts the plays by him and not all the books I have about him. There are a couple "Complete Works" here, along with a number of duplicates. I believe we have 3 individual copies of Hamlet and Richard III, and that doesn't count the fact that I have 4 different versions of Midsummer.

The Mets come in next but the team isn't actually penning all of these books, so much as Tom has a bunch of yearbooks for the team.

I have 15 each of Rowling and Moore books, and I'm pretty sure those 2 authors cover the widest range of categories. I have both authors stuff in paperback, hardback, and audiobooks, and one of my Moore books is an ebook.

There are a lot of Bills on this list. Who knew that was such a poplar name? Bill James does sports almanacs, one of each comes out each year (so much sports), hence his large number.

The biggest thing I've learned from putting this list together is I really need to cut down my books. I love books, obviously. And a lot of the books I have I do like to revisit and reread, either in part or the whole thing. But there are a lot of books here that I'm never going to touch again. Or there are a lot of books that we have duplicates of. And I don't even mean different prints or translations; we have a bunch of books where Tom and I brought the exact same version to the table. Or just Tom, cos somehow he managed to collect a few duplicates all on his own.

The question is now what to do with the books. I'll probably do some giveaways with the books I think people might actually like. But what to do with the others? I know there are options out there: donating to a library, or a school, or a prison or selling to a used bookstore. Have any of you gone any of these routes and if so what was your experience?

Lists lists lists

Who doesn't love a good list? They make up roughly 63.4% of the internet. Even when making a list doesn't make that much sense. Oyster put together a list of 100 Best Books of the Decade So Far which seems like a weird designation. Why not say like the last 5 years? Or just make up some random like "Top books that have pink covers" or whatever. ANYWAY

Top books of the decade so far. I actually only heard about this list because The Book Stop, who mentioned that Where'd You Go, Bernadette is NOT on the list, so I'm going into this with a bad frame of mind. But really, HOW COULD THEY LEAVE IT OFF?

I was going to reproduce the list here and highlight which ones I read, except that would require me typing them all out rather than copy and pasting. Or copy and pasting, but with a fair amount of reformatting and no, I'm sorry. I have a Sims family I've been neglecting. Instead I'm going to just list out the ones I read and where they fall on the list. And then probably complain some more about Bernadette being snubbed.

3. Life After Life by Kate Atkinson - I dunno if this would have made my list, let alone so high. But to each their own.
7. A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan - Yes. Good. I approve.
10. People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry - What? Really? I mean, I liked this but top 10 best books of the decade so far? Are you sure?
15. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell - Alright, back on track. Also at this point the list doesn't include numbers, making me count. Rude.
24. 11/22/63 by Stephen King - Not life changing, but I certainly enjoyed.
33. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - I'm just surprised they put it so low. I'll be reviewing this...eventually.
35. Bad Feminist by Roxane Gay - I'm glad this wasn't an overlooked book cos I could see that happening.
43. Station Eleven by Emily St. John - Yes, I enjoyed this very very much. No review yet, BUT SOON. Hopefully.
48. Bossypants by Tina Fey - Haha yes this one is a good time.
62. Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn - Yeah, this isn't surprising. I mean, it was eeeeverywhere.
76. A Fault in Our Stars by John Green - Another not-too-surprising pick. (This isn't a bad thing, btw. The choices don't have to be a surprise. Probably shouldn't.)

Alright, now for the books that SHOULD HAVE BEEN ON THE LIST, COME ON NOW

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple
The Martian by Andy Weir
The Rosie Project by Graeme Simsion
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
Tell The Wolves I'm Home by Carol Rifka Brunt
Alif the Unseen by G. Willow Wilson

So there, I fixed their list. I don't really now how I'd order these within what they have cos I've only read those 11 above which leaves 89 that I have no opinion on. But they should still all be on there and fairly high up. Dammit.

What are your thoughts on this list?

The Book Riot approved well read book list

You know how I love lists? Especially when I don't have another post ready to go. I just finished American Gods so that will be coming soon...ish. Book Rioter Jeff put together a list of books to read if you'd like to be well read. Now, with every list of books that you "must read" there are going to be books you disagree with, books you think are missing, etc. But that doesn't stop me from seeing where I stack up against other people's lists.

Plus Loni over at Eye of Loni's Storm and Sarah over at Sarah Says Read both posted their lists and I want to play along.

Bolded are the books I've read. Let's see how well-read I am

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
All Quiet on the Western Front by Eric Maria Remarque
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Klay by Michael Chabon
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Beowulf
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
Brave New World by Alduos Huxley
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Call of the Wild by Jack London
Candide by Voltaire
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer I've read a few of the stories (in Middle English, so be impressed) but never managed the whole thing
Casino Royale by Ian Fleming
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson complete? No, but I've read a number of them
The Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
The Complete Stories of Flannery O’Connor Well, I have this one and I should really read it. But the book is so big (complete stories and whatnot)
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen Yeah I'll get to this. One day
Crime & Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dream of Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Dune by Frank Herbert
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
Faust by Goethe
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Game of Thrones by George RR Martin
The Golden Bowl by Henry James
The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
The Gospels
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
Harry Potter & The Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling Oh perhaps you noticed I read this series
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday
Howl by Allen Ginsberg
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
if on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino
The Iliad by Homer
The Inferno by Dante
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exepury In French, no less! I get bonus points for that, even if it took the better part of a school year to make it through
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
The Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus, King by Sophocles
On the Road by Jack Kerouac
A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
The Pentateuch
Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Romeo & Juliet by William Shakespeare
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Slaughterhouse-5 by Kurt Vonnegut
The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
The Stand by Stephen King
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Waiting for the Barbarians by J.M. Coetzee
Watchmen by Alan Moore
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
1984 by George Orwell
50 Shades of Grey by E.L. James

45 which is surprising. I didn't expect to have so many read. I am going to go ahead and give a lot of credit to being made to read a number of these in various English classes. There are others on here I would like to get to (Invisible Man has been sitting in my pile of books for awhile now. And of course Franzen...) and then those that I'm not exactly clamoring for (50 Shades just...I already read Twilight so that should count).

So there you go. How'd you do?

Books you need to read in your 20s

My co-worker sent me this Buzzfeed list, 65 Books You Need To Read In Your 20s, and you know how much I love a list so here it is. I don't put too much stock with any list that says "X books you have to read,"  but I at least appreciate that the original list gives you reasons for each book. Besides, I always like seeing where I stand. So, here we go

The bolded books are the ones I've read

Great Novels
1. The Emperor's Children by Claire Messud
2. What She Saw... by Lucinda Rosenfeld
3. The Deptford Trilogy by Robertson Davies
4. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
5. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
6. A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
7. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
8. Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid
9. The Moviegoer by Walker Percy
10. White Teeth by Zadie Smith
11. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
12. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
13. Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney
14. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
15. Call Me by Your Name by Andre Aciman
16. The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis
17. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
20. A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
21. The Sandman series by Neil Gaiman
22. The Group by Mary McCarthy
23. Quicksand and Passing by Nella Larsen (the list says it's 2 novellas so I guess that equals 1 book. Plus the whole Sandman series made it up above
24. Pastoralia by George Sanders
25. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
26. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
27. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
28. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
29. His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman
30. Generation X by Douglas Coupland
31. The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
32. Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
33. I Love Dick by Chris Kraus
34. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
35. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues by Tom Robbins
36. Hard-Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World by Haruki Murakami

So out of their Great Novels category I've read 7 of the 36. Not only that, I haven't even heard of the majority of these. I will need to add some more books to my TBR list. Cos you, know, that wasn't long enough yet. Now the next category

Great Memoirs
37. Bossypants by Tina Fey
38. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
39. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People by Toby Young
40. The Dirt by Motley Crue and Neil Strauss
41. Lunar Park by Bret Easton Ellis
42. Just Kids by Patti Smith
43. Another Bullshit Night in Suck City by Nick Flynn
44. Oh the Glory of It All by Sean Wilsey
45. I Don't Care About Your Band by Julie Klausner
46. Wild by Cheryl Strayed
47. Lit by Mary Karr
48. I'm with the Band by Pamela Des Barres
49. Dear Diary by Lesley Arfin

And 2 out of 13 in the Great Memoirs section. Though I've read Kitchen Confidential so many times I should get to count it at least twice.

Poetry
(I didn't leave out the Great. The list did.)
50. The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton by Anne Sexton (well, I've read Transformations a few times, but not all her stuff)
51. Actual Air by David Berman
52. The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch by Kenneth Koch
53. Alien vs. Predator by Michael Robbins
54. The Collected Poems of Audre Lord by Audre Lord

And none out of the poetry stuff. Though poetry isn't really my thing so I'm not so surprised.

Essays That Will Make You Think And/Or Laugh
55. Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
56. How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran
57. My Misspent Youth by Meghan Daum
58. Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
59. Up in the Hotel by Joseph Mitchell

1 out of 5 but Caitlin Moran's book is so great so bonus points

General Life How-Tos
60. How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman
61. How's Your Drink? by Eric Felten
62. The Elements of Style by Strunk & White
63. Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens
64. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards
65. He's Just Not That Into You by Greg Behrendt & Liz Tuccillo (I started reading this one and thought it was terrible and DNF-ed it. Which was sad cos I like the little bit of Behrendt's stand up I've seen.)

None in the general life how-tos, though really I should probably get some more guidance there.

Out of the 65 on the list, I've read 10. I thought i would have read more. I did not expect to not even recognize so many. As I said above, I'm not to worried about not having read all (or even half) of the books on the list. I certainly won't be reading all of these before I'm out of my twenties, consider I have less than a year to do that.

How'd you do with the list? Do you recognize more than me? And I realize I didn't tell you which ones I don't know. But just figure if I didn't read it and it's not an obvious one everyone knows, I probably didn't recognize it. Way to make me feel like a loser, Buzzfeed.

50 Essential Sci-Fi Books (most of which I haven't read)

Sarah posted this list of the 50 Essential Science Fiction Books as decided by Richard Davis over at AbeBooks. I love lists so OF COURSE I decided to post the list here and see how I did. Not well, is the answer, but here we go anyway. Bolded titles are the ones I've read

1. A Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
2. The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells
3. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
4. When Worlds Collide by Edwin Balmer
5. Odd John by Olaf Stapledon
6. 1984 by George Orwell
7. Earth Abides by George R. Stewart
8. Foundation by Isaac Asimov
9. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury
10. The Demolished Man by Alfred Bester
11. Ring Around the Sun by Clifford D. Simak
12. Mission of Gravity by Hal Clement
13. The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett
14. The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
15. The Death of Grass (or No Blade of Grass) by John Christopher
16. Starship Troopers by Robert Heinlein
17. The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut
18. Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank
19. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
20. Venus Plus X by Theodore Sturgeon
21. Solaris by Stanislaw Lem
22. The Drowned World by J.G. Ballard
23. Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
24. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
25. Dune by Frank Herbert 
26. Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
27. Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan
28. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
29. The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin
30. Behold the Man by Michael Moorcock
31. Ringworld by Larry Niven
32. Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke
33. Roadside Picnic / Tale of the Troika by Boris & Arkady Strugatsky
34. The Female Man by Joanna Russ
35. Man Plus by Frederik Pohl
36. The Stand by Stephen King
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
38. Nor Crystal Tears by Alan Dean Foster
39. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
40. Consider Phlebas by Iain M. Banks
41. Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold
42. Hyperion by Dan Simmons
43. Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
44. Ribofunk by Paul Di Filippo
45. Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson
46. Uglies by Scott Westerfeld
47. Old Man’s War by John Scalzi
48. Little Brother by Cory Doctorow
49. Acme Novelty Library #19 by Chris Ware
50. Embassytown by China Mieville

So 6 out of 50 (I must have miscounted before when I commented on Sarah's post). I'm surprised it's so low given I did take an entire class on Sci-Fi lit in college. But I suppose that focus was more on short stories. There are a few on here I've wantched to check out for awhile (Do Androids Dream) but I honestly haven't even heard of a lot of the titles on here.

Book Rioters Fav Books and also I love lists

 So Book Riot compiled a list of Rioters favorite books and then listed them out and asked you to tell them how many of these favorites you've read. Because I LOVE LISTS, I'm going to not only record that number over at Book Riot (which I already did) but also share the list here and tell you which of the books I've read.

Now, none of my favorite books is on here (Lamb, The Eyre Affair/Thursday Next series, WHERE ARE YOU?) but there are some pretty good ones.

I've read 21 1/2 (19 if you required to have finished the entire series to count and also if you don't want to count an abridged version). Bolded are the ones I've read. What's your number?

1. To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee (126 votes)
2. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
3. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
4. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
6 . The Lord of the Rings series by J.R.R. Tolkien I read the first 2 and part of the 3rd before quitting. I put in my time. This counts.
7. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
8. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
9. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
10. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
11. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
13. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
14. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
15. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
16. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
17. The Stand by Stephen King
18. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
19. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
20. Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
21. Persuasion by Jane Austen
22. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
23. The Brothers Karamozov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
24. The Outlander series by Diana Gabaldon
25. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
26. The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
27. The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
28. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
29. The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
30. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
31. 1984 by George Orwell
32. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
33. Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
34. Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
35. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
36. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
37. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams Again, read the first one, still counts.
38. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
39. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
40. Ulysses by James Joyce
41. Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell
42. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
43. Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
44. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
45. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
46. Dune by Frank Herbert
47. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
48. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo. I've decided to 1/2 count this one. I read an abridged version
49. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
50. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (13 votes)

Most Best Teen Novels

It's been awhile since I posted a list of books on here and NPR has apparently decided this needs to be rectified. Or they made their own list independent of my little blog and in fact don't acknowledge my existence at all. Jerks. Whatever the case, NPR asked people to vote for their Top 100 Best-Even Teen Novels. Now I'm not a YA fan but I scanned the first few titles and said "Oh hai, I know those" so I figured why not post the list and see which ones I've read and haven't. Also this gives me more time to procrastinate on getting reviews written. However, I am only listing the top 50 because after that I hardly even recognize the titles that come after that and don't feel like spending my time NOT highlighting or italicizing stuff. Priorities, I haz them. So bolded titles are ones I've read entirely, italics are ones I read part of, since they include series as a single number and I want credit for The Lord of the Rings.

1. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
2. The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins
3. To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee
4. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
5. The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkein - not yet but coming soon (maybe)
6. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
7. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkein
8. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - this counts as YA lit? what now?
9. Looking for Alaska by John Green
10. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
11. The Giver series by Lois Lowry
12. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams
13. The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton - I also own the movie. On VHS.
14. Anne of Green Gables series by L.M. Montgomery
15. His Dark Materials series by Philip Pullman
16. The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
17. The Princess Bride by William Goldman
18. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
19. Divergent series by Veronica Roth
20. Paper Towns by John Green
21. The Mortal Instrument series by Cassandra Clare
22. An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
23. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
24. Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher
25. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
26. Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson
27. Twilight series by Stephanie Meyer - stop judging me!
28. Uglies series by Scott Westerfeld
29. The Infernal Devices series by Cassandra Clare
30. Tuck Everlasting by Nathalie Babbitt
31. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
32. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants by Ann Bashares
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. Will Grayson, Will Grayson by John Green and David Levithan
35. Go Ask Alice by Anonymous - but isn't not really by anonymous but actually by someone pretending it was a true diary to convince people that drugs are bad? (or so says Snopes)
36. Howl's Moving Castle by Diane Wynne Jones
37. Stargirl by Jerry Spinelli - the hell? This but not Maniac McGee? Something's afoul here. Because MM - "explores racism & homelessness" and SG is apparently about a manic pixie dream girl (so says NPR so don't yell at me)
38. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
39. Vampire Academy series by Richelle Mead
40. Abhorson trilogy by Garth Nix
41. Dune by Frank Herbert
42. Discworld/Tiffany Aching series by Terry Pratchett
43. My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Piccoult
44. The Dark is Rising Sequence by Susan Cooper
45. Graceling series by Kristin Cashore
46. Forever... by Judy Blume
47. Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin
48. The Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini
49. The Princess Diary series by Meg Cabot
50. Song of the Lioness series by Tamora Pierce

Out of the top 50 I've read 18, if I include those where I at least read one in the series. And I include that. This number of read stays exactly the same, even if I include the next 50. So yup. What we need on this list is more YA lit written before the new millennium. Then I'd have way more read. Maybe. Some more at least.

110 Best Books for the Perfect Library or I love lists

Imperfect library. Telegraph says you only need 110 books...

I love lists. Brenna at Literary Musings has a list (or rather it's the Telegraph's 110 best books for the perfect library but whatever) and she went through, crossed off the titles she's read and italicized the ones she wants to read. And I wanted to play so I have done the same.

CLASSICS
The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer
The Barchester Chronicles, Anthony Trollope
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
War and Peace, Tolstoy
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
Middlemarch, George Eliot

POETRY
Sonnets, Shakespeare
Divine Comedy, Dante (I've read Inferno, but not Purgatorio or Paradisio)
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer (I know I've read several parts but not the whole thing)
The Prelude, William Wordsworth
Odes, JohnKeats
The Waste Land, T. S. Eliot
Paradise Lost, John Milton
Songs of Innocence and Experience, William Blake (same here. I know I've read a bunch of stuff from this collection, but not all)
Collected Poems, W. B. Yeats
Collected Poems, Ted Hughes

LITERARY FICTION
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
A la recherche du temps perdu, Proust
Ulysses, JamesJoyce
For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honour trilogy, Evelyn Waugh
The Ballad of Peckham Rye, Muriel Spark
Rabbit series, John Updike
One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Human Stain, Philip Roth

ROMANTIC FICTION
Rebecca, Daphnedu Maurier
Le Morte D'Arthur, Thomas Malory
Les Liaisons Dangereuses, Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy, Mary Renault
Master and Commander, Patrick O'Brian
Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Dr Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
The Plantagenet Saga, Jean Plaidy

CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, C.S. Lewis (although I loved the cartoon of it, I never read)
The Lord of the Rings, J.R. R. Tolkien (I looove the movies and I almost made it through the series but Return of the King killed me. I couldn't do it. Also this is in the Children's section? Really Telegraph?)
His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
Babar, Jean deBrunhoff
The Railway Children, E. Nesbit
Winnie-the-Pooh, A.A. Milne (I think I may have missed my chance here. If I didn't read it when I was little, I probably shouldn't bother now)
Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling
The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

SCI-FI
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
1984, George Orwell
The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham
Foundation, Isaac Asimov
2001: A Space Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick
Neuromancer, William Gibson

CRIME
The Talented Mr Ripley, Patricia Highsmith
The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammett
The Complete Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep, Raymond Chandler
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, John le Carré
Red Dragon, Thomas Harris
Murder on the Orient Express, Agatha Christie
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe
The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins (I'm reading this one in April! I can finally play along with one of Alice's Readalongs)
Killshot, Elmore Leonard

BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Das Kapital, Karl Marx
The Rights of Man, Tom Paine
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
On War, Carlvon Clausewitz
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes
On the Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (I've read very little of this, but still I'm counting it cos man was it a pain)
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin
L'Encyclopédie, Diderot, et al

BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD (this seems presumptuous. You don't know what changed my world Telegraph)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig
Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Richard Bach
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell
The Beauty Myth, Naomi Wolf
How to Cook, Delia Smith
A Year in Provence, Peter Mayle
A Child Called 'It', Dave Pelzer
Eats, Shoots and Leaves, Lynne Truss
Schott's Original Miscellany, Ben Schott

HISTORY
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, Winston Churchill
A History of the Crusades, Steven Runciman
The Histories, Herodotus
The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Compiled at King Alfred's behest
A People's Tragedy, Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama
The Origins of the Second World War, A.J.P. Taylor

LIVES
Confessions, St Augustine
Lives of the Caesars, Suetonius
Lives of the Artists, Vasari
If This is a Man, Primo Levi
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Siegfried Sassoon
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
A Life of Charlotte Brontë, Elizabeth Gaskell
Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves
The Life of Dr Johnson, Boswell Diaries, AlanClark

Only 20 and 1/2 (or a 1/4 or however much those partial reads add up to) books read. But this is a pretty hefty list so I'm still happy with that number. Even if the majority of reads are in the sci-fi section. And NOTHING in the Romance, History or Lives sections. Whoops. Or not so much whoops as yes, that sounds about right based on my tastes.

I love lists...

Darlyn over at Your Move, Dickens found a list of the 100 best novels of the 20th century, as selected by Radcliffe College publishing students for a publishing course list. I'm a sucker for lists so I decided to see how I stacked up against the list they've put together. Bolded are the books I've read

1. "The Great Gatsby," F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. "The Catcher in the Rye," J.D. Salinger
3. "The Grapes of Wrath," John Steinbeck
4. "To Kill a Mockingbird," Harper Lee
5. "The Color Purple," Alice Walker
6. "Ulysses," James Joyce
7. "Beloved," Toni Morrison
8. "The Lord of the Flies," William Golding
9. "1984," George Orwell
10. "The Sound and the Fury," William Faulkner
11. "Lolita," Vladmir Nabokov
12. "Of Mice and Men," John Steinbeck
13. "Charlotte's Web," E.B. White
14. "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man," James Joyce
15. "Catch-22," Joseph Heller
16. "Brave New World," Aldous Huxley
17. "Animal Farm," George Orwell
18. "The Sun Also Rises," Ernest Hemingway
19. "As I Lay Dying," William Faulkner
20. "A Farewell to Arms," Ernest Hemingway
21. "Heart of Darkness," Joseph Conrad
22. "Winnie-the-Pooh," A.A. Milne
23. "Their Eyes Were Watching God," Zora Neale Hurston
24. "Invisible Man," Ralph Ellison
25. "Song of Solomon," Toni Morrison
26. "Gone with the Wind," Margaret Mitchell
27. "Native Son," Richard Wright
28. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest," Ken Kesey
29. "Slaughterhouse Five," Kurt Vonnegut
30. "For Whom the Bell Tolls," Ernest Hemingway
31. "On the Road," Jack Kerouac
32. "The Old Man and the Sea," Ernest Hemingway
33. "The Call of the Wild," Jack London
34. "To the Lighthouse," Virginia Woolf
35. "Portrait of a Lady," Henry James
36. "Go Tell it on the Mountain," James Baldwin
37. "The World According to Garp," John Irving
38. "All the King's Men," Robert Penn Warren
39. "A Room with a View," E.M. Forster
40. "The Lord of the Rings," J.R.R. Tolkien
41. "Schindler's List," Thomas Keneally
42. "The Age of Innocence," Edith Wharton
43. "The Fountainhead," Ayn Rand
44. "Finnegans Wake," James Joyce
45. "The Jungle," Upton Sinclair
46. "Mrs. Dalloway," Virginia Woolf
47. "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz," Frank L. Baum
48. "Lady Chatterley's Lover," D.H. Lawrence
49. "A Clockwork Orange," Anthony Burgess
50. "The Awakening," Kate Chopin
51. "My Antonia," Willa Cather
52. "Howard's End," E.M. Forster
53. "In Cold Blood," Truman Capote
54. "Franny and Zooey," J.D. Salinger
55. "Satanic Verses," Salman Rushdie
56. "Jazz," Toni Morrison
57. "Sophie's Choice," William Styron
58. "Absalom, Absalom!" William Faulkner
59. "Passage to India," E.M. Forster
60. "Ethan Frome," Edith Wharton
61. "A Good Man is Hard to Find," Flannery O'Connor
62. "Tender is the Night," F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. "Orlando," Virginia Woolf
64. "Sons and Lovers," D.H. Lawrence
65. "Bonfire of the Vanities," Thomas Wolfe
66. "Cat's Cradle," Kurt Vonnegut
67. "A Separate Peace," John Knowles
68. "Light in August," William Faulkner
69. "The Wings of the Dove," Henry James
70. "Things Fall Apart," Chinua Achebe
71. "Rebecca," Daphne du Maurier
72. "A Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy," Douglas Adams
73. "Naked Lunch," William S. Burroughs
74. "Brideshead Revisited," Evelyn Waugh
75. "Women in Love," D.H. Lawrence
76. "Look Homeward, Angel," Thomas Wolfe
77. "In Our Time," Ernest Hemingway
78. "The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias," Gertrude Stein
79. "The Maltese Falcon," Dashiell Hammett
80. "The Naked and the Dead," Norman Mailer
81. "The Wide Sargasso Sea," Jean Rhys
82. "White Noise," Don DeLillo
83. "O Pioneers!" Willa Cather
84. "Tropic of Cancer," Henry Miller
85. "The War of the Worlds," HG Wells
86. "Lord Jim," Joseph Conrad
87. "The Bostonians," James Henry
88. "An American Tragedy," Theodore Dreiser
89. "Death Comes for the Archbishop," Willa Cather
90. "The Wind in the Willows," Kenneth Grahame
91. "This Side of Paradise," F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. "Atlas Shrugged," Ayn Rand
93. "The French Lieutenant's Woman," John Fowles
94. "Babbitt," Sinclair Lewis
95. "Kim," Rudyard Kipling
96. "The Beautiful and the Damned," F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. "Rabbit, Run," John Updike
98. "Where Angels Fear to Tread," EM Forster
99. "Main Street," Sinclair Lewis
100. "Midnight's Children," Salman Rushdie

I've got 23 read. I was doing pretty well in the beginning, and then as I went down the list I had read fewer and fewer and nothing at all after Hitchhiker. I wonder how the order was decided. The students had to select 100 books out of a list of 400 for the list, and then a group of instructors put those lists together, so perhaps the books at the top were the ones that showed up the most times on each list. In that case, it makes sense that I'd read more of the ones at the top of the list. Those are the, in general, most popular books. I have no idea if that's actually how the order was decided but makes sense to me.

So how's your list look?

1001 Books You Must Read...but I probably won't

There's a challenge going around based on the book 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die* and first of all I want to commend everyone that is taking on this challenge because it is daunting.  And I know you're not supposed to read all 1001 books in a year but it still seems like a hefty challenge nonetheless.  I'm not going to take part in the actual challenge because anytime I'm told to do anything (even if I'm the one doing the telling) I tend to do the opposite.  So I think if I said I would do this challenge I would not read any books and suddenly become a big Jersey Shore fan and no one wants that. (Jersey Shore is the opposite of reading books right?)  But I don't want to be left out of the fun of lists(!) so I figured I'd go through this list and tell you the ones I've read already.  A couple people have already done this (Lit Musings** and Dead End Follies) and their lists intimidate me, which is probably another reason I won't be participating.  Mostly the pressure thing though.

2000s
1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
Wow that is pathetic.  1 from the 2000s.  I have The Corrections sitting on my shelf, but I got distracted by the collection of books a friend send me.  I'll get to it soon.  Soon-ish.

1900s
2. Jazz by Toni Morrison
3. American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
4. The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
5. A Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving
6. Beloved by Toni Morrison
7. Watchmen by Alan Moore & David Gibbons
8. The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
9. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
10. If On A Winter's Night A Traveler by Italo Calvino
11. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
12. The Shining by Stephen King
13. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
14. Sula by Toni Morrison
15. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
16. Slaughterhouse-five by Kurt Vonnegut
17. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
18. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut
19. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
20. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
21. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
22. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
23. Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
24. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
25. Giovanni's Room by James Baldwin
26. The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien (I practically made it through the full thing and this list is making me sad, so go with it)
27. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Animal Farm by George Orwell
30. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupery
31. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
32. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
33. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
34. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Alright, I got 33 here.  Better showing but I'm afraid that will be my best category.

1800s
35. Dracula by Bram Stoker
36. The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
37. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
38. The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
39. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
40. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
41. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
42. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
43. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
44. The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allen Poe
45. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
46. The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe
47. The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
48. Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
49. Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
14 here.  I guess that sounds about right

1700s
50. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
51. A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift
2 and it's still better than the 2000s

pre-1700s
52. Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
53. Aesop's Fables by Aesopus
Even my pre-1700s score beats the 2000s.

So there you go.  53 down.  I don't know how many to go.  I'd need to go through the list and pick out the ones I would like to read.  Let's just say x to go.  (Check out my use of math.  I'm getting ready for that Physics book.)

*You can sort the list of books by author lifespan.  It's what it defaults to.  That seemed kind of messed up to me.

**If you check out Brenna's post and read the comments, you'll notice without even considering the challenge myself I'm trying to convince her to cheat and count the books she reads in multiple challenges.  Just another reason why I'm not taking on these challenges.

Are you well read?

I saw this list over a Dead End Follies and Too Many Books, Too Little Time and thought I'd play along.  Supposedly the BBC put together a list of 100 books and claim that people will only have read 6 of these books on average.  I'll bold the books I've read, italicize the books I've read a part of.

I say "supposedly" because I noticed these 2 blogs have 2 different lists of books.  So I tried searching for the list the BBC put together.  And I can't find it.  I found a list of the top 100 nation's best beloved books but this didn't say anything about how only 6 of these books are read on average.

I then found the list Too Many Books was using over at LibraryThing, but again, nothing about the BBC or 6 reads.

Kristjan Wagner over at Pro-Science noticed the same thing I noticed, namely that this BBC list isn't around.

So from all I can see the BBC doesn't think people will only read 6 books on the list below, but I still want to see how many I've read so here we go.  I'm using the list off of LibraryThing only because that's the list I've seen repeated a couple times.  If someone can find an actual list by the BBC please let me know!

Let's see how I stack up:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien -- I read the first two books of the series but just couldn't make it through Return of the King. I tried but couldn't do it.

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell 

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

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've read a lot of Shakespeare but I can't say I've made it through all of the works (Timon of Athens, A Winter's Tale)

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky (at least twice)

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis

34 Emma -Jane Austen

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen

36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis -- So the Chronicles of Narnia was just mentioned at number 33.  Does this not count as part of it?

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 – A.A. Milne

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

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

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

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

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

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce

76 The Inferno – Dante 

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

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 – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – E.B. 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

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery -- read it in English and French! Don't ask me to do that again, I don't remember enough French to do it.

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 -- This list is repetitive.  It already asked if I'd read the complete works.  Come on people!

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl 

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


I have 30 bolded and 7 italicized.  How do you stack up to this completely arbitrary list?

Update!  My good friend Paolo is far better at internet research than I (and probably doesn't give up after 5 whole minutes of looking) and found what looks to be the original list on the Guardian.  No mention of the BBC or 6 books but if you want to check it out, here you go! http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/mar/01/news