Popular novels, past and present

[felis_ultharus]

Meme instructions : Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you've read, italicize the ones you might read, cross out the ones you won't, underline the ones on your book shelf, and place parentheses around the ones you've never even heard of.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
(The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger)
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince - J. K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J.R. R. Tolkein
(The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon)
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
(The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini )
(The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold )
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
(Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson)
(The Secret History - Donna Tartt)
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C. S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell )
The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkein
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (half read)
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
(Atonement - Ian McEwan )
(The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zagon)
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert

Comments

[melting-penguin.livejournal.com]

Congrats on being done (almost)!

Hmm, I think I've read at least 3/4 of that list...most of it was delectable.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It is a pretty good list -- everything there was once popular, so someone liked it :)

[blumunk.livejournal.com]

No Wuthering Heights? Why not? That was unexpectedly one of my favorite books.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

I've just been avoiding the 19th century, my least-favourite literary period for prose.

I have been pleasantly surprised by some (Pride and Prejudice, the half of Jane Eyre I've read). But for the most part the period is just painful to read.

I might re-consider Wuthering Heights, though. what did you like about it?

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

And btw, Atonement is brill. It's a masterpiece, and oh so very sad.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

What's it about...?

[em-fish.livejournal.com]

It's about a lot of things, but mostly it is about a girl who witnesses a crime at her family estate in 1935. She doesn't witness it in the sense of actually seeing it, but put it this way - she knows the truth of what happened better than most of the adults around. Someone is falsely accused of the incident, and she spends a good chunk of her life trying to reconcile herself with her role in the whole mess.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

It does sound interesting. I may add it to pile.

Then, when I construct my fortress out of books I intend to one day read, it shall form part of battlements :p

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

The Time Traveller's Wife is a nice book. But that's sort of all.

You might like the Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime. It's about an autistic boy trying to solve a mystery.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting premise. It sounds like the sort of thing that would be hard to pull off well.

What's The Time Traveller's Wife about?

[sugar-spun.livejournal.com]

It's a love story about a man who involuntarily time travels to various points in his own life, and the woman who loves him but first meets him when she's a child.

[felis-ultharus.livejournal.com]

That's a neat premise for a book.