Well Read?

I'm not sure I've mentioned it before, but I'm a pretty big reader. DH and I are together, because we both read and were impacted by the Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. Lately, (read: since the advent of Tivo) my reading has been abyssmal. I can't keep up with the paperbacks my boss loans to me. But every once in awhile, I catch up on my Tivo, and will finish an entire book in a day or a weekend.

This is a picture of my 'to do' pile. It includes the Bible (3rd from bottom because of size, not importance). Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich, which I'm reading right now, and it's hilarious, lest you worry she ran out of Grandma Mazur antics in the previous 13 editions! The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, which I must admit I am only reading because I read in People a few months ago that Ashlee Simpson and Pete Wendt were reading it, and I thought it sounded good. And by good, I mean, depressing. But mostly, its just boring me right now. Above that is Hannah's Hope (IF). Above that, Baby Proof, which I didn't feel like reading because one of the main characters doesn't want a baby and the other does and at the time I got this book it just all seemed too depressing. And from there they get smaller - mostly mysteries or crime dramas loaned to me by my boss. God bless her reading addiction and her penchant for sharing!

I read classics, mysteries, and chick lit. I even read non-fiction when it suits me (IF is a popular topic these days). And I 'feel' like I'm well read. I can usually get all the jokes in the Simpsons or the Big Bang Theory, and a lot of times I feel like you have to be well read to catch their inferences. But I read this list below, many of the books I had never heard of, and I feel kind of ... well ... not-so-well-read. Like maybe I've been reading too much Janet Evanovich and not enough Jane Austen.

In my defense, my poor little brain can only think so hard when mucked up with stims and other random hormones. Alas, the list of movies I've seen is longer than books I've read, at least with this list. I still think of myself as an intellectual. But perhaps need to add a few of these titles to my amazon wish list. So, without further adieu...

I stole this meme from Busted.

Here's how it works:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE - mine are in red
4) Reprint this list in your blog.
5) I am adding a new rule, because its my blog and I can, I'm going to mark the ones I haven't read, but I've seen the movie in green. And if I've read the book AND seen the movie, well, then it will be BOLD and Green.

The premise of this exercise is that the National Endowment for the Arts apparently believes that the average American has only read 6 books from the list below.

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 - ok, I've read some, so if I could, I would make this partly bold.
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
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 Galaxy
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 Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (seriously, makes me cry every time!)
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
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 (this is the only book of his that I haven't read!)
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath (again, wish I could half bold this. I've started it, but never finished it!)
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 (no, but I have read Tuesdays with Morrie)
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French, no less, shouldn't I get extra credit for this???)
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