Lol Pretentious

[cynchick]

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkein
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 Ninteen 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 Faulk
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 Glaxy - 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 Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Davinci 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
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 Adverntures 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

42/100. Not bad I guess. XD

Comments

[helicopini.livejournal.com]

Props for getting through Wuthering Heights. I can't seem to hack that one, even though thematically I should love it. I couldn't get past the writing style.

The only one I'm scared of on that list is Ulysses. My dad told me horror stories about it.

Surprised that you haven't read The Handmaid's Tale, though. I thought they made everyone read it in HS.

[water-faerie.livejournal.com]

I had a choice to read The Handmaid's Tale, our teacher was like "I think it's boring when I have to read 25 essays on the same book!" So she gave us 10 different books to choose from!

Is the Handmaid's Tale good?

[helicopini.livejournal.com]

Tricky question. It depends on how you feel about Atwood in general.

Her early books could get a wee bit polemical. Not that she didn't have a point, mind you. If nothing else, there's a lot of material in The Handmaid's Tale to spin into a cultural relevance essay.

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

I loved Wuthering Heights. I guess Ive read so much Shakespeare that the archaic style didnt bother me much, though Josephs dialogue was damn near impossible to understand. lol.

Well, I went to high school ten years ago so maybe its changed. But we read the Odyssey (and I read the Illiad on my own) and some Shakespeare in English class. I didnt take an actual Lit class until college though, or I probably would have read more.

[hieronymousb.livejournal.com]

Ulysses is simply no fun to read. It's nothing but literary allusion after literary allusion. Very typical of modernism. Some modernist texts, i.e. The Waste Land by Eliot (smaller-scale example) were very rooted in allusions and were, therefore, lit only for the litsy.

[water-faerie.livejournal.com]

LOL

#6

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

yeah....i started it out of curiosity and got through about 1/3 of genesis before i couldnt do it anymore. lol.

[vermelli.livejournal.com]

I had like four attempts at Ulysses. It could be interesting, I even liked very much a certain character, but there was always some point of overeating - with the language, with how pointless some paragraphs and whole chapters were.

Since I saw the movie, I want to read badly Great Expectations. Classics are generally one of my favourite readings :3

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

same here. classics are classics for a reason. :)

btw, after seeing what people are saying about it, i doubt i will ever attempt to read Ulysses. XD

[sensuelles.livejournal.com]

Wow...I'm impressed. That's a VERY long reading list^^

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

Hehe. Ive read quite a few more that arent on there. I used to be a huge reader before i had teh internets. i was one of those high school students who spent their sunny saturday afternoons at the public library. XD

[cultofdecay.livejournal.com]

i started mentally checking off the books i'd read on that list, mostly for the lol value, because i have read a total of two books that aren't illustrated in the past six months. amazingly, i've read 72 of the books on that list.

this makes me so sad, because it means that i used to use my time constructively, but now i'm just a big dumb loser.

that said, time to get back to the latest brainless shoujo i'm addicted to (hana kimi)...

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

i think you win over all my flist for the most read. Ive read a lot of classics that arent on the list, but a lot of these are still on my to-do list.

i watched the hana kimi j-drama (mostly because Toma Ikuta is made of Hawtness) and it was pretty hilarious. havent read the manga though. another j-drama that i really liked a lot was Honey and Clover. its about a group of art students trying to figure out who they are. you would probably like it a lot (and identify) XD. the one manga im currently obsessing over is NANA. Lol late to the party i know, but its just so. fucking. good.

[cultofdecay.livejournal.com]

whatever, late to the party isn't always bad. because then you get to sit down and enjoy 29587 chapters without having to wait a month for the next one.

i've read way more non-classics. the bulk of this list consists of books that i read between 16 and 20 because i felt i should beef up on books people always quoted. i was a very precocious teenager and my boyfriend at the time was totally bourgeois. his parents were both academics and i was just going with the flow.

nowadays, i just read dave eggers, david sedaris, etc. because i like books that you never have to struggle with and that make you laugh until you cry at least once every ten pages.

i finally finished thomas pynchon's 'against the day' around christmas. it's over 1000 pages long, and he is one of my top five authors ever, but the book took me about eight months to finish. two years ago, it would have taken me a month of reading here and there. i'm actually embarrassed to admit that i just don't have the concentration span for reading like i used to. i get started on a book, but because of all the time i spend on the internet, i have this add thing where i can't go on for too long without thinking, "oh i should check my email, read something random on wikipedia, and then look at some dumb blogs".

actually, that thing about two books? they were against the day and eggers' what is the what, but apart from that, i also read all four twilight books. which is even worse. it means my brain has regressed so far that, literally, twilight is the best i can really do.

i picked up roberto bolano's 2666 the other day. it's 900 pages long and theoretically i'm going to read it on the way to and from japan (27 hours of transit on the way back, christ) but i sincerely believe that my brain can't handle it anymore.

(meanwhile, i patiently await your next itasaku...)

[cultofdecay.livejournal.com]

i didn't even realise i'd typed that much.

i could have just summarised that by saying, "i used to be smart, and now i'm not".

also: now smoking pot daily again. there is possibly a correlation.

i'm starting a new bachelors in september (this time in something that requires me to read instead of paint). there is the potential for epic, epic fail.

[cynchick.livejournal.com]

smoking too much pot causes major apathy, which is a synonym for Big Dumb Loser. easy enough to remedy, no? :p

im currently reading the 'Tales of the Otori' series by Lian Hearn. ive only just started the first book, but the genre and premise are very relevant to my interests and it comes highly recommended by my beta whose opinion on such things i trust. before that i read Wuthering Heights and The Scarlet Letter, and before that I read the Twilight series for the trainwreck and the lulz. i guess we're in the opposite situations. lol

[cultofdecay.livejournal.com]

i try! oh man, i try. i keep getting irritable when i stop smoking pot. i have this weird acid reflux thing that's been interfering with my day to day life since about november, and it even keeps me up late a night. three hits off a joint and i'm sleeping like a baby. i want to stop getting stoned but the doctors aren't coming up with better solutions.

anyway, come september, i am retaking cal I&II, and taking math 233 vector, matrices & geometry; physics 231 mechanics and waves; and physics 242 electromagnetism and waves. after 5 years of "lol i just painted a cat", i think i'm gonna have to stop smoking pot (or doing anything pleasurable in my spare time, for that matter) to do "real shit".

what about you? any plans to finish up at school? or are you working now?