Thursday 2 December 2010

NaNo's history! Let's go from writing to reading - Here's my Book Tag - How many have you read?



Okay, NaNo's over. I was going to do a smart post-NaNo post, but I'm sure there'll be heaps of those around. I'll just say it was very difficult and I have 20,000+ words to go to turn my 50,000 word novel into the book I want. Lots of work ahead as always after NaNo. Posts I've read so far have questions as to whether we found NaNo worthwhile. Yes, yes, yes. I'm a great fan because of the discipline it encourages. If we can write 50,000 words in November, which is such a busy month in many ways, we should be able to repeat that in a quieter month.

So, let's go from writing books to reading books...

You may have seen this tag around the blogosphere and fb. I find it interesting, do you? The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books listed here. The challenge is: Have you read more than 6 of these books? Please join in, accept the challenge, then pass it on. Perhaps some wag will contact the BBC with the results...

And I'm sorry, I'm not sure who I copied this post from...maybe Ellie? Theresa? If I find out, I'll link back...



Instructions:


• Copy this list.
Bold those books you’ve read in their entirety.
Italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish or read only an excerpt.
• Tag other book nerds.

I'm going to add another instruction (why not!): underline those books you plan to read in 2011. So here goes:

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The King James Bible - (yes, really!)
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
Nineteen Eighty Four (1984) – George Orwell
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
Complete Works of Shakespeare - I own it, who could possibly read ALL?
Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk
Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
Emma - Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
Winnie the Pooh – A.A. Milne
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The DaVinci Code – Dan Brown
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Atonement – Ian McEwan
Life of Pi – Yann Martel
Dune – Frank Herbert
Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Secret History – Donna Tartt
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
On The Road – Jack Kerouac
Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
Moby Dick – Herman Melville
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Dracula – Bram Stoker
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
Ulysses – James Joyce
The Inferno – Dante
Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
Germinal – Emile Zola
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
Possession – AS Byatt
Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
The Color Purple – Alice Walker
The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White
The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
Watership Down – Richard Adams
A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
Hamlet – William Shakespeare
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
Les Miserables – Victor Hugo


??? (Hmm, the list does appear to be missing book no. 100!)


So here's my addition to the list, to fill in missing #100 – The Thorn Birds, Colleen McCullough (let's be indulgent here!) Which book would you add!


Woot, 52 (I think I added it up right)!!! Take that BBC!!


Too many tags to be made. Take the list if you'd like to have a go at the challenge. Can't wait to see what you've read!

Before you leave, if you are a member of Networked Blogs, please click on the 'follow me' bar on mine and I will return the favour. I've just joined.

And if you have missed it, Talli Roland's book The Hating Game The Hating Gameis now out on kindle. Grab yourself a copy. It may not be on the BBC list, but it's a lot more fun than a lot of the 100 Books listed above. Oh, no Kindle, no problem. You can download a free app. from the mighty Amazon.


And, in the interests of furthering my literacy-ness (anyone else find the humour in making up a word when talking about whether or not you're well-read?), are there any books you'd recommend I read from the non-italicized, non-bolded, non-underlined books above?

Happy reading and writing!

Denise

28 comments:

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

Go Talli!
I'm in the same boat - still another 20,000 words to go to finish.
And I've read 28 of those books.

Joanna St. James said...

these lists keep on changing, and I hate counting (writer much?) but i would like to add 20,000 leagues under the sea by jules verne.

Denise Covey said...

Excellent Alex. Yes, go Talli!

Joanna: Good add. I'd like to add One Day in the Life Of Ivan Denosovitch by Alexander Solzhentichin (I'm not going to look up the spelling. Y'know who I mean! God, I can't help it: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.

The Words Crafter said...

There seems to be more than one list out there. On this one, I've read 19. I would add Unwind by Neal Shusterman. If anyone chooses to read it, give it time to lay out the characters. Then it gets busy and at the end....all I can say is whoa..

I, too, loved nano and plan to take at least half of this month to read read read!!!

notesfromnadir said...

Thanks so much for adding my contest link to your page!

I think it's great that you've accomplished 20,000+ words of your novel. You have to go at your own speed & hopefully you'll reach the end of your draft soon. I understand that some days it's almost impossible to write at all--even a few lines--because other things need our attention.

I have a copy of that 100 book list on my FB page & will look at it next year -- too many things to do now before relaxing w/ a good book!

Talli's doing so well w/ her BlogSplash & I'm so happy her book is really being mentioned all over the internet!

Kittie Howard said...

I adore the BBC and hate to toss them a snowball, but I've read 52.

I'd add The Winds of War by Leon Uris (and Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is a must.)

Denise Covey said...

TheWordsCrafter: Yes, I've seen a couple but this is the one I ended up with. Thanks for the recommendation of the book. Sounds great!

Hey Lisa, I did finish, just have to keep writing to get to 70,000 words.

Kittie: Love both of your recommendations! Read the same amount as I have. Mean to do a bit more over Christmas!

Adina West said...

Wow, 52 is a good total...and to help your memory I'm pretty sure the blogger you got this post from was Rach over at Rach Writes (our illustrious Crusade leader). I recognise her style (and her made up word. It's literariness, people!)

LOL.

;-)

Patricia A. Timms-McGehee said...

Great job on the 52. You rock!

I read 20 and partially read 10. On my blog I mentioned wanting to add Just So Stories by Rudyard Kipling. And then I wondered where For Whom the Bell Tolls was and The Picture of Dorian Gray. That' just me though.

I'm looking for another 10,000 in my NaNo story for perfection but I could live with another 5,000. Congrats on NaNo!

Al said...

54.

I seriously think a few of those books should not be on that list.
I have to say I embarrassed by some of those that I think I should have read.
Hear hear A Day in the Life Of Ivan Denosovitch.

Sarah Smith said...

Unfortunately I haven't read all of them. But I will try. Thanks for posting this list. Regards from Hotel Orly

Sandra Patterson said...

22 - better than 6!
Who chose this list anyway?
I've copied it to my blog.

Talli Roland said...

Thank you so much for helping me to spread the word! I really appreciate your support. :)

Jai Joshi said...

I've read 27 of those books and half of about 10 more.

Jai

Denise Covey said...

Adina: Thanks for reminding me it was Rach!

Patricia: I'm with you. Where is Hemingway?

Al: Aren't we well read! Yes, I wonder about a few.

Natalie: It's a big ask to read them all.

Sandra: I'll look forward to seeing it on your blog.

Talli: Okay.

Jai: Great.

Francine Howarth said...

Hi,

58 of the listed books read, but I am counting Dickens & Shakespeare as one book not complete collections!

Recommended reading: *The Magus* by John Fowles. He truly transports a reader to the fictitious island of Phraxos, the perfume of Oleanders intoxicating as are his inner thoughts. Beautifully written, and a great way to guage the mind of a man tempted in extremes, especially when wanting as a writer to portray POV of male hero!

best
F

N. R. Williams said...

I've seen that list before and was delighted that I'd read plenty of them. Not going to tell though, that takes too much brain work and my brain is tired from edits and children. What a loaded question L'Aussie, I would recommend some books but I might appear to be selfish. LOL
Nancy
N. R. Williams, fantasy author

Rachael Harrie said...

(*laughs at Adina's comment*). Yep, that was my post, guilty! Sigh, everyone's a grammar critic (*chortles*).

Well done on finishing NaNo, Denise, and thanks for sharing your books. It's been really interesting reading what other people have read :)

Rach

Cheryl said...

What a great idea - I'm in and am off to find out about Networking Blogs and to post this on my blog - linking back to you. Thanks.

Loz said...

28 read for me:)

Unknown said...

Wow, that's really cool. I might actually do this challenge now that I have time.
CD

Deborah Carr (Debs) said...

Congratulations for being a NaNo winner. I still have a way to go to finish my book, but did enjoy taking part and was thrilled to get 50,000 words down and a lot of brainstorming for my book.

I don't think I've read nearly as many books as you have from this list.

Denise Covey said...

Francine: Oooooohhhhh, you are the only other person who's ever said how they love The Magus. It is on my list of best books ever! NOt surprised you share this love. No argument that you are one well-read lady!

Nancy: I wanted to hear!! You should have been indulgent!

Rachael: Thanks for providing the list and the grammar mistake Rach!

Cheryl: Great, great , great!

Loz: Good on you! Long as it is over 6 *laughs*

Clarissa: How come you have time now mystery lady! You are relaxing!

Debs: Yes, I think NaNo is a great boost! Thanks for the comment!

Amie Kaufman said...

I've read 46 and have a pile on my shelf waiting for their turn.

I'd highly recommend Swallows and Amazons. It was my favourite book as a kid (it's still one of my very favourites) and launched a thousand childhood adventures.

kerrie said...

HI Gal
I have read some of the books mostly at school- a century ago and dont really want to read again; but maybe I should ...Since I started writing I dont read nearly as much, my eyes have only so much time before they give up and blur everything and my brain has only so much time before it to just want to vegetate infront of a screen.
As for the november novel thing congrades to you! I thought of singing up but ending up decluttering instead got caught up in a whole pile of stories from another century back when I had vision of being a romantic writer now I know why I am single ...
cheers

Denise Covey said...

Amie: Well done you! I haven't read your recommendation but will look for it!

Kerrie: Hi there! Yeah, there's only so many hours in the day. Glad to meet you!

The Cafe Crawler said...

ive only read 15 and have partially read some others... gonna work my way through those this holiday ! :)

I have another list of books already, though! The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Braine that Changes Itself, Tomorrow When the War Began, Dune, Atonement, etc. Have you any of those by any chance?

oh yes, i totally agree that One Day in the Life of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn should be added to the list!
What about The Book Thief?

Just to let you know, I love visiting you blog ! :)

The Cafe Crawler said...

*your blog. :)

oh, did you like "Rebecca" ??

Someone suggested that book to me ages ago... I guess I should read it ? :)