One of the FaceBook friends posted "100 Books You Should Have Read (According to BBC)" on my FaceBook page. Curious, I checked it out and liked what I just saw. I got an idea... and here I am writing this blog. This dear friend is the owner of Deaf Pagan Crossroads blog and she is VERY intellectual, widely read, widely travelled, etc. Check her out:
http://deafpagancrossroads.com/
Anyway, "100 Books You Should Have Read" states that you"bold"ed the books you have read in the entirety; "italic"ed the books you've started or read parts from, but not read entire book; and "underline"ed books you've seen movies of. For anyone who wants to know what BBC stands for, it's British Broadcasting Corporation. Of course, where else but Great Britain, well-known for the novel classics... as well as William Shakespeare.
Out of 100 books, I have read only 21 books in entirety. That's too few, I realized. I have seen the movies based on several books... 26 movies. Still too few. Hmmm... a light bulb switched on in my head and an idea for me...to have a "New Year Resolution" for the year of 2011. I'd read a book from the list, per week and watch the movie based on it. And at the end of 2011 I'd be able to claim to be "literate" in classic novels and movies. Oh yes, I read widely, but I could use to be a bit more familiar with the classic novels... for some reasons, I feel a little intimidated by the idea of reading the classic. Well, anyone feels daunted by the idea of reading War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy? That's how I feel toward the idea of the classics... which deals a lot of Europeanized English. I am SO used to Americanized English. I just checked the list and I see it's on the list, umph.
I have MANY graphic novels and many of them have "Graphic Classics" in volumes, which exhibits the classics in the abridged comic form. So I will "warm up" with the comic before progressing to read the unabridged novel and then upon the completion of the novel, I will watch a movie based on it. Luckily, many novels are free for downloading on my Kindle, so I won't spend a cent at all. Yes, I did spend a few pennies on the comics, but they are well worth spent. Check the website out:
http://www.graphicclassics.com/
I tend to buy them on Amazon because they are cheaper.
Right now, I am reading (AND enjoying...) the anthology of the comics called "The Flight", which presents an unique approach to fantasy:
Anyway, copied and pasted here on my blog:
1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
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. 1984 – 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
15. Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
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
23. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Graham
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
37. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere
39. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh – AA 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 Goldin
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 Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
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 Flauber
86. A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte’s Web – EB 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
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
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
I want to state that I Googled for the best novels and I have come across a few... worthy for you to check them out:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction
http://www.listsofbests.com/list/5884-100-classic-novels
http://www.empirecontact.com/novels/
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