Hello all.
Did you know that cheesecake was invented in Ancient Greece? Well, it was. Which is interesting, because if you think about the value of cheesecake and compare it to everything the Romans ever gave us… the Greeks totally outshone the Romans, eh? Well okay, the Romans were pretty awesome. But they were building on what Greeks had already done! I mean, they couldn’t even invent their own gods, you know? They just stole them from Greece and Egypt and renamed them so no one would suspect. From Poseidon to Neptune, Aphrodite to Venus… I am a little curious why they bothered to rename them at all anyway.
I was just musing on that really. I’m not sure where the idea came from.
Ooh, also:
Have you read more than 6 of these books? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. (If I may interject; there are quite a few more than 100 books listed as some of the titles are series titles, so consist of more books! Oh now I’m just nit-picking.)
Instructions: Copy this into your journal. Bold the books you’ve read in their entirety, italicize the ones you started to read but didn’t finish or read an excerpt from, and underline those you own but have not read yet.
I’m also putting an asterisk (*) next to those that I plan to read sometime soon.
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. Nineteen Eighty Four – 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
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 – Lev 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
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 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 (I have never heard of this, but am already intrigued. *ed.)
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-Exuper
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
Total: Bold (I have read completely) 22.
Italics (I have begun to read, or have read excerpts of) 11.
Underlined (I own but haven’t/don’t plan to read yet) 8.
*ed – those that I plan to read, regardless of owning them or not – 11.
!!!!! I would like to draw attention to the fact that this is technically listed twice. If we are saying that a book series is allotted one space, and we must assume this is so based on other examples, then The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe shouldn’t be listed as it is already counted in the Chronicles of Narnia.
The books I own that I have also read total: 16.
Actually, looking back over that list, Hamlet shouldn’t be mentioned separately from The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, since it is the complete works of Shakespeare and Hamlet would therefore be in it! Oh BBC, for all the wonderful things you produce for us, you really should work on this. But I do see the point; too few people read genuinely well-written books these days, and fewer still the ones written prior to the 20th century. It is a crying shame that this is the case, but it cheers one up to see how many titles come up in bold on this!
Books I was surprised weren’t on the list (though they’re not all of them classics… here, I’ll bold the good ones and underline the bad ones in my opinion as a reader and writer. Anything I am neutral on, I’ll leave in normal font).
A Series of Unfortunate Events
Artemis Fowl Series
Twilight Saga
The Inheritance Cycle
Anything Else Relating to Vampires and Romance
Agatha Christie novels such as Miss Marple or Poiroit novels
There are probably more, but that will do – they sprang to mind while I was going through the list.
And that’s all folks!
Somewhat Resignedly,
Lexiconish.
Music: Blame it on the Pop 2005 Remix
Book: Artemis Fowl – Annual Reading Number One
Mood: Proxy Error.
A Veritable Lexicon Of Nonsense 