My Secret Confession

I confess- I am not the bookworm I claim to be. I just checked out the shortlisted novels for the Man booker. There might be a record broken with JM Coetzee up for a third win. Very exciting! Although, I feel guilty that I haven’t read any of the books shortlisted so can make no claim whatsoever on who I think should win. I also confess that I spend way too much time reading ‘pulp’ like Charlaine Harris and Stephenie Meyer rather than ‘proper’ books. I try and balance it out but there is not enough hours in the day to read it all which makes me think every book I pick up should be chosen wisely. For every Twilight book I devour there is a Pulitzer prize-winning work of literature waiting to be read. How incredibly stressful!

To make my guilt worse, there was a facebook email going around with a list of 100 books. You were supposed to write down how many you had read and pass it on to your other ‘bookwormy’ friends. My friend got over half. I was so embarrassed that I got a third (well 38) that I couldn’t bring myself to forward it on. I’m supposed to be a bookworm after all right? So why the heck am I on 38? Maybe because they don’t have books by wonderful writers such as Cormac McCarthy, Bret Easton Ellis and Jeffrey Eugenides. Okay, now I’m making excuses for myself. I’ll just admit I’ve got a bit of a way to go before being ‘well-read’. And what better way to confess my reading shortcomings than on my quasi-secret blog.

Here’s the list.

1. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) – Yes
2. The Lord of the Rings (JRR Tolkien) – Yes
3. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) – Yes
4. Harry Potter series (JK Rowling) – Yes
5. To Kill a Mockingbird (Harper Lee) – Yes, one of my favourites.
6. The Bible – No
7. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) – Yes
8. Nineteen Eighty Four (George Orwell) – Yes, another favourite
9. His Dark Materials (Philip Pullman) – Yes
10. Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) – No
11. Little Women (Louisa M Alcott) – No
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles (Thomas Hardy) – No
13. Catch 22 (Joseph Heller) – No
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare – About half
15. Rebecca (Daphne Du Maurier) – No
16. The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien) – Yes
17. Birdsong (Sebastian Faulks) – No
18. Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger) – Yes
19. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) – No
20. Middlemarch (George Eliot) – No, but dying to as George is a ‘she’ and that makes me excited
21. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) – No
22. The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald) – Yes
23. Bleak House (Charles Dickens) – No
24. War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) – No
25. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) – Yes
26. Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh) – No
27. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) – No
28. Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) – No
29. Alice in Wonderland (Lewis Carroll) – Yes, love it. Have it permanently on my ipod too
30. The Wind in the Willows (Kenneth Grahame) – No, although keen too as I want to learn about badgers
31. Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) – No
32. David Copperfield (Charles Dickens) – No
33. Chronicles of Narnia (CS Lewis) –Yes
34. Emma (Jane Austen) – No, feel double guilty as it’s what I’m named after
35. Persuasion (Jane Austen) – No
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (CS Lewis) – Yes
37. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) –Yes
38. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin (Louis De Berniere) – Yes
39. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) – Yes
40. Winnie the Pooh (AA Milne) – Yes
41. Animal Farm (George Orwell) –Yes – I love you George!
42. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown) – Yes
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) – No
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney (John Irving) – No
45. The Woman in White (Wilkie Collins) – No
46. Anne of Green Gables (LM Montgomery) – No
47. Far From The Madding Crowd (Thomas Hardy) – No
48. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) – No
49. Lord of the Flies (William Golding) – Yes
50. Atonement (Ian McEwan) – Yes
51. Life of Pi (Yann Martel) – Yes, fabulous book
52. Dune (Frank Herbert) – No
53. Cold Comfort Farm (Stella Gibbons) -No
54. Sense and Sensibility (Jane Austen) – No
55. A Suitable Boy (Vikram Seth) – No.
56. The Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon) – No
57. A Tale Of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) – No
58. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) – No
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Mark Haddon) – Yes, a unique and fascinating read. Great voice.
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) – Yes
61. Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck) – No
62. Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov) – Yes
63. The Secret History (Donna Tartt) – No.
64. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) – Yes, so sad and beautiful at the same time
65. Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) – No
66. On The Road (Jack Kerouac) – No
67. Jude the Obscure (Thomas Hardy) – No
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary (Helen Fielding) –Yes
69. Midnight’s Children (Salman Rushdie) – No
70. Moby Dick (Herman Melville) – No
71. Oliver Twist (Charles Dickens) – No
72. Dracula (Bram Stoker) – Yes
73. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) – No
74. Notes From A Small Island (Bill Bryson) – Half, plan to reread
75. Ulysses (James Joyce) – No
76. The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath) – No
77. Swallows and Amazons (Arthur Ransome) – No.
78. Germinal (Emile Zola) – No
79. Vanity Fair (William Makepeace Thackeray) – No
80. Possession (AS Byatt) – No.
81. A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens) – No
82. Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell) – No.
83. The Color Purple (Alice Walker) – No
84. The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro) – No.
85. Madame Bovary (Gustave Flaubert) – Yes (I’m glad I wasn’t named after this ‘Emma’)
86. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) – No.
87. Charlotte’s Web (EB White) – Yes
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) – No.
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle) – No.
90. The Faraway Tree Collection (Enid Blyton) – Yes, Dick and Fanny never fail to amuse
91. Heart of Darkness (Joseph Conrad) – Yes
92. The Little Prince (Antoine De Saint-Exupéry) – No
93. The Wasp Factory (Iain Banks) – No
94. Watership Down (Richard Adams) – Yes
95. A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole) – No
96. A Town Like Alice (Nevil Shute) – No.
97. The Three Musketeers (Alexandre Dumas) – Yes
98. Hamlet (William Shakespeare) – No, seen the play though
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (Roald Dahl) – Yes
100. Les Miserables (Victor Hugo) – No.