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Tuesday 1 February 2011

Paper-back to the Future... BookElf's List.

I made this: BookElf at 4:00 pm

Lists of Books What You Should Have Read are more popular than ever; the Richard and Judy list-of-the-decade has been floating about (see below), as well as the usual '1000 books to read before youd die' that N kindly sent me on a spreadsheet...

Am I the only one who is made to feel incredibly inadequet as a reader by these lists? I've read less than a third of the Richard and Judy one, and am ashamed, I read a lot. Infact I have very little of a life outside of reading.

I got "noted" (is that what the kids are calling it these days?) on a Facebook books-to-read thing the other day and had barely read three quarters of them. I'll say it again I have no life outside of my books.

So I thought balls to this, I'm making my own list! One I'm *gurenteed* to have read the whole lot of. Just to make myself feel better. And If you've not read any on it, they YOU SUCK*

There are 88 of them purely at the suggestion of @MawScrawl, who thought up the title. Props to him. One book per author, otherwise it gets silly.

A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
A Girl Name Disaster, Nancy Farmer
A Kind of Intimacy, Jenn Ashworth
A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khalid Hosseini
After You'd Gone, Maggie O'Farrell
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Anastasia Krupnik, Lois Lowry
Anne of Green Gables, LMM Montgommery
Bad Girls, Jaqueline Wilson
Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, John Boyne
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Burial, Neil Cross
Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M Auel
Close Relations, Deborah Moggach
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
Crown With Candlelight, Rosemary Hawley Jarman
Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon
Danny the Champion of the World, Roald Dahl
Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell
Dracula, Bram Stoker
Falling for a Dancer, Deirdre Purcell
Far From The Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy
Flour Babies, Anne Fine
Forever Amber, Katherine Windsor
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Gone With The Wind, Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Greenwitch, Susan Cooper
I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
I Know Why The Cadged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Susanna Clarke
Little Women, Louise Alcott
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
Love in a Time of Cholora, Gabriel Gael Marquez
North and South, Mary Gaskell
Noughts and Crosses, Malorie Blackman
Of Mice and Men, John Stienbeck
On The Road, Jack Kerouac
Paradise, Toni Morrison
Pursuasion, Jane Austen
Push, Sapphire
Rebecca, Daphnie DuMourier
Remains of the Day, Kasuo Ishiguro
Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry, Mildred D Taylor
Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged 13 3/4, Sue Townsend
Sovereign, CJ Sansom
Tenent of Wildfell Hall, Anne Bronte
The Cider House Rules, John Irving
The Color Purple, Alice Walker
The Cry of the Go Away Bird, Andrea Eames
The Far Pavillions, MM Kaye
The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet's Nest, Stieg Larsson
The Glass Lake, Maeve Binchey
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
The Help, Katherine Stockartt
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Addams
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkein
The Hours, Michael Cunningham
The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
The Kitchen God's Wife, Amy Tan
The Little Princess, Francis Hodgeson Burnett
The Long Walk, Slavomir Rawicz
The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
The Once and Future King, TH White
The Other Hand, Chris Cleave
The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
The Secret History, Donna Tartt
The Time Machine, Jules Verne
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
The Woman Who Walked Into Doors, Roddy Doyle
The Woman's Room, Maralyn French
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
This Charming Man, Marian Keyes
Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters
Treasure Island, Robert Lewis Stevenson
Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackery
Watership Down, Richard Adams
We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver
Wetlands, Charlotte Roche
Wild Swans, Jung Chang
Wolf Brother, Michelle Paver
Wolf Hall, Hilary Mantell

*you don't actually suck, obvs.

3 comments :

Unknown on 1 February 2011 at 16:46 said...

52.
I would say 52 and a half, ala one of our more recent recruits, but I really didn't finish that Donna Tartt at all.

levantate said...

Hee, I've done better at this list - 31!

BookElf on 4 February 2011 at 11:30 said...

Still can't believe you didn't get on with The Secret History! Its one of the best books I've ever read- a masterclass in structuring alone.

 

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