Book Meme

[ihrketayhl]

Swiped this from remikku, 'cause I felt like it.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (I know, I fail as a fantasy fan. XD)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 1984 - George Orwell (sitting on my shelf. in my room. SOMEDAY I WILL READ IT.)
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 Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot (AHAHAHAH I AM NEVER READING THIS; I already wrote a ten-page paper on it and got an A-, what is the point I ask you.)
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 (YES.)
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 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 (Wait, I'm confused, how is this not Narnia?)
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 - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (seriously? why the hell is this on here?)
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 (WILL NEVER READ AGAIN.)
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 Flaubert
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

Dude. Genji's not even on there. Da Vinci Code, WTF, seriously, it's not even well-written.

...I really want to complain about how the list is so biased towards particular authors (Austen, Dickens), and how it totally should've had Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man on there, but I'm worried this'll make me sound, uh, even geekier than usual.

If this was a list of classic J-Lit, I would totally have bolded the entire thing, I bet you money.

Also, all of ya'll, go see Hancock. That movie rocked my socks in ways that I cannot even fully articulate for fear of spoiling people, as I am prone to do. GO SEE IT. Before The Dark Knight drives all other superhero movies from your mind.

Comments

[just-you-wait.livejournal.com]

Saw Hancock tonight. Very unique. At times a bit farfetched, but pretty good on the whole.

[ihrketayhl.livejournal.com]

I loved it. :D

Also, WTF are you doing lately, are you still in StL?

[just-you-wait.livejournal.com]

be back in StL next month! I've still got your Spirited Away and Wolf's Rain.

[remikku.livejournal.com]

Ah, you have Les Misérables and The Count of Monte-Cristo italicized! My two favourite books! I would highly, HIGHLY recommend them, especially to someone who's read Genji, after that they should be easy reads ; ) In fact, you may already know, Les Mis has been adapted into a musical and basically every country with a musical theatre industry has done a production of it. My friends and I are flying out to Québec this summer for a week, just to see the production with the first ever entirely québécois cast <3 Dumas and Hugo are the HEROS of classic French literature. Heh, I tend to get carried away when shamelessly advertising their works ^^;;

I was wondering what other books (after Genji, of course) you would suggest for classic Japanese lit? Last year I went to Uji city in Japan, which is where I picked up the Genji recommendation, but after that I don't really have any other ideas of what to read ; )

[ihrketayhl.livejournal.com]

It's actually reading your list that made me italicize Les Mes! I know a lot of people who love the musical (which I haven't yet been able to see because 1. have been busy and 2. tickets for the FOX--theatre where I live--sell out rather fast and are expensive), but I've never really heard anyone rave about the book. Kinda like Phantom of the Opera; it's easy to forget there is a book, sometimes. But I'm definitely interested now. :D Once I get my moving situation under control I'ma head myself to a bookstore and acquire a copy~ (and I agree, anything after Genji is CAKE.)

Count of Monte-Cristo, I have had recommended to me by so many people it's insane. XD I'm not entirely sure how I've managed to go this long without reading it, really. So that one's just a matter of time. :D

And I have a lot of J-Lit recommendations and have to leave for work in a half hour, so, in order to save myself time and not be late for work: is there a particular period you're interested in (i.e. pre-Edo, during-Edo, modern, postwar...?) and/or genre that you prefer, and are you intending to read these works in their original Japanese or English translations? *IS A TREMENDOUS GEEK ABOUT JAPANESE, sorry XDDD*

[remikku.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm probably weird that I wanted to read the book long before I ever heard of the musical for Les Mis ^^;; We read an excerpt from it in my French class once and I fell head over heals in love with it, so I read the abridged version in French (because there's no way I could have read ALL of it in French no matter how fantastic it is... I think my brain would have exploded XD) and then the entire book in the English translation. Les Mis is... maybe a couple of steps under Genji as far as difficulty level and it's around the same length, just over 1000 pages if I remember correctly. Monte-Cristo is probably a couple of steps under Les Mis (still around 1000 pages and still a pretty difficult read... for normal people XD) and I think it's more "user-friendly" in a way. It tends to be popular with people who aren't really into reading the classics (whereas Les Mis, sadly, isn't ;__;) Les Mis was my favourite book until I read Monte-Cristo, although Monte-Cristo only JUST beat it out... Les Mis is more about a man's struggle for redemption and a society's yearning for revolution, whereas Monte-Cristo focuses on revenge and an individual's right (or lack thereof) to act as the "scourge and minister" of heaven. Both are about the injustices of society and the ridiculously harsh criminal "justice" system that used to exist in France. What is always fascinating about French classics is that they have a fantastic way of taking a huge cast of characters and weaving every single one of them flawlessly into the intricate tapestry of the novel. I've never seen it done as well in any other genre of novel ^__^ (OMG I need to stop typing... I'm an ENORMOUS fanatic of classic French lit XD)

Sadly, I would have to read translations ;__; I wish my Japanese was good enough to tackle something like Genji... but I can't even imagine it. That's okay, I love Japan and I'm looking to become more knowledgeable and maybe even a geek about Japanese myself ^__^ And I'm such a nerd for the classics of ANY country... I don't really have a particular time period in mind... but again, classic-lit geek =D So maybe pre/during-Edo?

[ihrketayhl.livejournal.com]

Ahahah, we are going to get along, I think. XD That's exactly how I sound when I start flailing over Genji. Re: Monte-Cristo, also, that's generally what I thought--some of the people who've recommended it have said things like "AND I DON'T REALLY LIKE READING AND/OR LITERATURE USUALLY" which, well, makes me go o.O but pretty much supports what you said up there.

Oh, I wouldn't've suggested reading Genji in the original language. XDDDDD Even if you were fluent in modern Japanese, classical's another thing entirely, and Genji's language in particular is very poetic and weird--it'll be awhile yet before I can read it, that's for darn sure.

Okay, if you want the old stuff, I'd say check out the Kagerou Nikki/Kagerou Diary/Gossamer Diary, the Tosa Nikki and The Pillow Book, all of which should have multiple, easy-to-find English translations. Arntzen's translation of the Kagerou Diary is the one I read most recently, and it does a great job of mimicking the style of the Japanese--whether that's a good or a bad thing kind of depends on your tastes. XD Also, all of these works are contemporaries of Genji, and Genji makes reference to all of them at various points, so reading them will give you some context for that, too.

Oh, and Tales of Ise, what am I thinking. XDDD Tales of Ise, supposedly the autobiographical text of Ariwara no Narihira, is also from around the same time period, and it's been speculated by several scholars that Narihira was the inspiration for Murasaki's Genji. Of the super-classical stuff, Ise and the Pillow Book are my favorites.

I'm much more inclined towards Edo-and-later, tho. :P Edo period lit's often considered too vulgar or too pop-culture to count as "true" literature, but it's good stuff. :D I recommend anything by Ihara Saikaku and Hiraga Gennai--the latter's harder to find in English but he's freaking hilarious.

That enough, for now, or would you like more? :D I HAVE MORE. Also let me know if you'd like summaries or cultural context or whatnot for the stuff I've listed so far~ *geekgeekgeekitygeek*

[remikku.livejournal.com]

I know, it must be comparable to modern English speakers reading Shakespeare... but a billion times worse XDD I heard you can get modern day Japanese translations of Genji too, which is hilarious but probably very useful ^__^

Thanks so much! I'll be sure to check those out after I finish Genji... I do generally like the novels which imitate the original language's style, so that's probably right up my alley. It's probably all kinds of geeky and lame that I find book recommendations so exciting XD

For sure, if you have more I'd love to hear it! =D And if you have more recs from Edo-and-later, I'd love to hear those too. I haven't had much (err, any really XD) experience with Japanese literature, that is, until I read Genji, so a good assortment should give me an idea of what I like best. And I'm particularly excited to see contemporaries of Genji and the inspiration for Genji, so summaries would be like fantastic XD

How about you, what books are at the top of your To Read list? I saw on this post that you have Wuthering Heights, Memoirs of a Geisha, Dune, and Tale of Two Cities italicized. These are all somewhere on the list of my favourite books like ever ; ) If you like the vulgar Edo-period lit, then Wuthering Heights should catch your interest: it's written by the daughter of a curate and yet the style is very bold, improper and vulgar even. Especially in squeamish, up-tight Victorian society, it was not well-received at all. It's very brutal, a psychological train wreck. Memoirs of a Geisha (despite not being a very complicated or difficult read) was a book that I enjoyed immensely because of the plot, characters and cultural elements. Dune is amazing. It's probably the most epic Sci-Fi novel in existence. It is a big hefty book and it deals with some truly spectacular themes and concepts. And Tale of Two Cities <3 Oh Sydney Carton... "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known". And Two Cities is all about the French Revolution, which is a time period from which so much fascinating literature has been born =D

Ahh... I got carried away. Umm... food for thought, I guess XD

[cellardoorsky.livejournal.com]

I might steal the meme. And I watched Hancock! *WILL IM YOU FOR FEAR OF SPOILERS*

[ihrketayhl.livejournal.com]

:D :D :D YES IM PLZ. I miss you lots.