I heart reading

When I was growing up, almost nothing made me happier than reading. My sister and I wore out the childhood books we had at our disposal (most notably the Little House series, whose paperback covers were in tatters by the time we hit our teens). We went to the library religiously, and devoured every piece of literature, great or not, that we could get our hands on. Later during our teenage years, we would each frequently stay up all night reading (or re-reading) a good book. (Our mom discovered this eventually, and began to start policing "lights out" a little more firmly than before.) Even sleep, which is arguably my favorite pastime, is no match for a good book!


But, over years of dull required readings in high school and undergrad, not to mention the dry, skull-numbing power of the journal articles I read now, I had been slowly sapped of my reading zeal. It seemed like a dimension of my life was...lost. I got a small boost a few years ago when I got my first grown-up library card. I started checking out books, but then quickly lost interest when I'd read all of the titles I could recall wanting to read. Worse, I randomly checked out several books that looked promising, only to lose interest and then have to return them unfinished. I needed a way to discover books I might actually WANT to read.

Enter GoodReads. A few coworkers and I joined a few months ago. GoodReads, in case you haven't heard of it, is a social networking site based around book lists, reviews, clubs, and recommendations. I'm sure I'm not doing it justice with that description, because it's a complex site, but I appreciate all of the different avenues to finding new books I want to read. It's really rekindled my love of reading! It feels like coming home, and I'm so happy to be reunited with that familiar "reader headspace" I inhabited so much of as a child. Moreover, as an adult now, I like the opportunity to share what I'm reading (and what I think about it) with other individuals, however like-minded. So, in the spirit of GoodReads, I'm posting my answers to a book meme that made it's way around the Interwebs many months ago.


books I've read = bold
books I want to read = italics
seen the movie = *

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (one of my very favorite books!)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte*
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling* (seen all of the movies so far)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (another fave)
6 The Bible (all the way through, multiple times; it's like peeling an onion, to infinity)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte (I can't stand this book! Great essay fodder, though...)
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (I remember almost nothing of this book)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy* (saw half of the Masterpiece film version and it was so crushingly sad I couldn't make myself watch the second half)
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 (in progress; not what I'd call a page-turner)
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger (currently have a custody of a friend's copy)
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell* (I've seen most of the film)
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* (considering my sister did her undergraduate thesis on Carroll, I should at least read the book for solidarity's sake!)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame*
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis* (have seen the 2 movies out so far)
34 Emma - Jane Austen* (LOVE this book; its character archetypes are perfection!)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis* (see #33)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (good, but not as good as A Thousand Splendid Suns, his second book. That is one of the top 5 books of my life!)
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne* (read part of it, I think)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (NO. I will not jump on this bandwagon.)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (I genuinely do not understand why people think this book is so great. He is a master at setting the scene, but the characters and story of this book were confusing, pointless, and dull. Love in the Time of Cholera is better.)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - 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 (possibly the worst book I've ever read; it was great for writing essays though!)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan* (so depressed after the movie I can't make myself read the book)
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've heard Reading Lolita in Tehran is great, too)
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 (another great essay-fodder book)
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* (the Muppet movie version is divine!!)
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* (love, love, love 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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad (perhaps the best book ever for essays, but I did actually enjoy reading this one)
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 (I think everyone had to read this in high school except me)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl* (it's weird that I never actually read this, although I love both movie adaptations)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (I'd also love to see the musical)

It's kind of shocking to me how little I've actually read of "the classics"! What books on this list were good to you, dear readers? Did you go through a reading "drought" like I did? Wanna repost your version of this list in the comments? Go for it!

~Heather