Well I’ll Go To The Foot Of My Stairs…

Filched from my dear sister V…

June 2, 2009 · 16 Comments

…a bit of pointless  relief.

Instructions:
1) Bold those you have read.
2) *Star the ones you loved.
3) Italicise those you plan on reading.”


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  (bits of)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations
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
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 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*
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini*

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere (three pages – couldn’t stand it.)
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 (and the rest…)
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 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

So what does that say about me then?

Feel free to have a go…

Categories: Uncategorized

16 responses so far ↓

  • v // June 2, 2009 at 9:43 am | Reply

    :P

    Charlottes Web makes me cry every time.

    Ive been looking at books I enjoyed as a kid, wanting to revisit. I’ve got Marianne Dreams (by Catherine Storr) and Charlotte Sometimes (by Penelope Farmer) on my list.

    And I’ve wanted to read Momo (by Michael Ende) for ages..

    My library is pants though so i’ll have to order them in, after i’ve paid my fine :(

  • rmott62 // June 3, 2009 at 8:05 pm | Reply

    Don’t bother with “Lolita” it is pretentious rubbish.

  • witchywoo // June 4, 2009 at 5:15 am | Reply

    mmm… I always semm able to walk past it when I’m in the bookshop and pick up something that actually appeals to me, rmott. There is something distictlty “ew” about it.

    v – I’m still looking for “The Caboose That Got Loose” – a story I read to my daughter time and time again but can I find it? Nah.

  • Sarah // June 4, 2009 at 11:47 am | Reply

    http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=0395287154

    That one Witchy? And why, exactly, are there none of MY books on that list? Eh?

  • Kate // June 5, 2009 at 4:12 pm | Reply

    I *LOVE* the caboose that got loose and look for it regularly.
    ;-)

  • Sis // June 6, 2009 at 1:39 am | Reply

    I think it says you’re very busy, because you’ve only italicized two.

    Books I’d like to be able to read:

    How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidenced-Based Medicine

    Doris Lessing’s work. Because I have and I can’t remember it, but for the joy of living in her stories the whole time I read.

    Books on my shelf:

    Bread and Jam for Francis
    Goodnight Moon
    A Dictionary of Canadian English
    Insect Biology: A Textbook of Entomology
    Handbook of the Canadian Rockies
    Wild Swans

    The best book I ever read:

    The Diviners, because it was the first Canadian book I ever read. And it mentioned Canadian places, and talked about Canadian people, and about the Metis. But you weren’t supposed to say that, or know that.

    The best book I have ever owned:

    The one I just sold for $575.00, having bought it knowing what I would do with it. A piece of crap from cover to cover. Collectors do not care about literature.

    The best stories I have ever read:

    Where Will You Go, Sam Lee Wong?
    by Gabrielle Roy

    Who Do You Think You Are?
    by Alice Munro

    The book I am “reading” now:
    Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking

    The book I am listening to now:
    The Palace of Illusions

  • Sis // June 6, 2009 at 1:54 am | Reply

    You’d have to *really* want it:
    http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=caboose+that+got+loose&x=88&y=12

    Bill Peet:
    http://www.billpeet.net/PAGES/billpeet%27sbooks.htm

  • delphyne // June 6, 2009 at 6:20 pm | Reply

    “Bread and Jam for Francis”

    I loved that book when I was little! I was obsessed with meatballs and spaghetti after reading it too because we didn’t have food like that at our house.

  • v // June 6, 2009 at 8:53 pm | Reply

    id never heard of ‘The Caboose That Got Loose’ before, if its recommended i might get one of those secondhand ones for the kids..

  • simply wondered // June 7, 2009 at 10:37 pm | Reply

    i hate it when people recommend books just cos they happen to think they are great….
    but middlemarch might well be something you love – he knows how to write does george.
    seriously, it’s right at the top of my list.

  • Sarah // June 12, 2009 at 1:14 am | Reply

    “Instructions:
    1) Bold those you have read.
    2) *Star the ones you loved.”

    I did that, now I have pen all over my screen…..

  • witchywoo // June 13, 2009 at 1:07 am | Reply

    Thanks to you – my daughter now has a copy of The Caboose That Got Loose as an early birthday present (yeah, she reads here…). It arrived this morning and I was late to work because I *knew* what was in the cardboard package and I couldn’t help but go there.
    Hey… we’re both happy :D

    I’ll give Midlemarch a bash m’boy (he’s doing his GCSE’s you know…) seriously :)

    Aren’t books wonderful though? They can make us money by simply ‘being’, obsess children with food they don’t have/dreams they do have, put words to our experience, our dreams, tell us stories – tell *our* stories… Their role is endless, really.

  • Sarah // June 13, 2009 at 8:43 am | Reply

    Not to mention the therapy value for the writer…

  • Sis // June 16, 2009 at 8:01 am | Reply

    Me too, Delphyne. Didja think my copy belonged to a child. Ha ha. I shamelessly love several children’s books, and visit the children’s section when I go to a bookstore.

    I forgot to add Alice in Wonderland. I had no idea of its political import when I read it over and over well into my teens. First introduced to it by a very clever grade three teacher, who read us several pagesof it every morning. I couldn’t wait to get to school. What a gift.

  • spottedele // June 16, 2009 at 7:13 pm | Reply

    Sarah – You’ve just made me laugh very hard. Thank you!

    I’m feeling a bit horrified by how few books I’ve read on this list. I refuse to read Lolita, but I did enjoy “Reading Lolita in Tehran” very much.

  • simply wondered // June 23, 2009 at 8:45 pm | Reply

    ‘Aren’t books wonderful though? They can make us money by simply ‘being’, obsess children with food they don’t have/dreams they do have, put words to our experience, our dreams, tell us stories – tell *our* stories… Their role is endless, really.’

    also toilet paper in extremis (tho for lolita i’d make an exception and not require an emergency)

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