Of Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte: Jenn from Booksessed! (Jenn fought off stiff competition from a whole 9 other entrants! I don't know whether to be irritated, or pleased that basically everyone has read Jane Eyre!)
and, of How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran: Alice from Reading Rambo!
Congratulations you guys! I'll be emailing you later for your addresses and things (there will be no things, just the addresses...) and you'll have your books... sometime in life!
And now, since I know how boring posts where people have won things can be, especially if you're not the winner; how about a list? I saw this on Brenna's blog yesterday, and I was all interested, then I saw it on Alley's blog today so I was like, fine, I'll look at the list and say which ones I've read too. If I must. (I realise I'm totally being grumpy about this, which is inaccurate because actually, I bloody love lists!)
So anyway, this list I speak of is made up of the books that The Telegraph (also known as the Torygraph, and newspaper of some consternation in my house, because my dad buys it because he likes the sports pages, whereas I'd rather he bought The Guardian...) thinks would make up the perfect library. It's a pretty hefty list, and I think some awesome books are missing from it, but there you go. What I'm going to do is cross out the ones I've read, and also put the ones I own, and so am ready to read sometime, in italics. Makes sense, no? Let's go!
CLASSICS
The Iliad and The Odyssey- Homer
The Barchester Chronicles- Anthony Trollope
Gulliver's Travels- Jonathan Swift
War and Peace- Leo Tolstoy
David Copperfield- Charles Dickens
Vanity Fair- William Makepeace Thackeray
Madame Bovary- Gustave FlaubertMiddlemarch- George Eliot
POETRY
Sonnets- William Shakespeare (I've read like 3 of them, so I don't think I should count that...)
Divine Comedy- Dante
Canterbury Tales- Chaucer
The Prelude- William Wordsworth
Odes- John Keats
The Waste Land- TS Eliot
Paradise Lost- John Milton
Songs of Innocence and Experience- William Blake
Collected Poems- WB Yeats
Collected Poems- Ted Hughes
(Ok, I suck at reading poetry. But really, Telegraph? No Emily Dickinson? Sylvia Plath? Not even Walt Whitman- he's even a man! Song of Myself, anyone?)
LITERARY FICTION
The Portrait of a Lady- Henry James
A La Recherche du temps perdu- Proust (Ok, I only have part one. But still, it's a start!)
Ulysses- James Joyce
For Whom The Bell Tolls- Ernest HemingwaySword of Honour Trilogy- Evelyn Waugh
The Ballad of Peckham Rye- Muriel Spark
Rabbit Series- John Updike
One Hundred Years of Solitude- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Beloved- Toni Morrison
The Human Stain- Philip Roth
ROMANTIC FICTION
Rebecca- Daphne Du Maurier
Le Morte D'Arthur- Thomas Malory
Les Liasons Dangereuses- Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius- Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy- Mary Renault
Master and Commander- Patrick O'Brian
Gone With The Wind- Margaret MitchellDr Zhivago- Boris Pasternak
Tess of the D'Urbervilles- Thomas Hardy
The Plantagenet Saga- Jean Plaidy
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons- Arthur Ransome
The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe- CS Lewis
The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkein
His Dark Materials- Phillip Pullman
Babar- Jean DeBrunhoff (Although I did love the cartoon!)
The Railway Children- E Nesbit
Winnie The Pooh- AA Milne
Harry Potter- JK Rowling
The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
Treasure Island- Robert Louis Stevenson (I read this as part of a university unit, and it's so appropriate for all ages, not just children!)
SCI-FI
Frankenstein- Mary Shelley
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea- Jules Verne
The Time Machine- HG Wells
Brave New World- Aldous Huxley
1984- George Orwell
The Day of the Triffids- John Wyndham
Foundation- Isaac Asimov
2001: A Space Odyssey- Arthur C Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- Philip K Dick
Neuromancer- William Gibson
CRIMEThe Talented Mr Ripley- Patricia Highsmith
The Maltese Falcon- Dashiell Hammett
The Complete Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy- John Le Carre
Red Dragon- Thomas Harris
Murder On The Orient Express- Agatha Christie (I can't even describe how much I love this book!)
The Murders in the Rue Morgue- Edgar Allen Poe
The Woman in White- Wilkie Collins (I need to get a copy of this before April though!)
Killshot- Elmore Leonard
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Das Kapital- Karl Marx
The Rights of Man- Tom Paine
The Social Contract- Jean Jacques Rousseau
Democracy in America- Alexis de Tocqueville
On War- Carlvon Clausewitz
The Prince- Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan- Thomas Hobbes
On the Interpretation of Dreams- Sigmund Freud
On the Origin of Species- Charles Darwin
L'Encyclopedie- Diderot, et al
BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M Pirsig
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull- Richard Bach
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point- Malcolm Gladwell
The Beauty Myth- Naomi Wolf
How to Cook- Delia Smith
A Year in Provence- Peter Mayle
A Child Called 'It'- Dave Pelzer (this book did not at all change my world, and all it seems to have done is open the floodgates for any and all abused children to write books outlining their experiences. To which I say, I'm sorry and all, but please. Just stop.)
Eats, Shoots and Leaves- Lynne Truss
Schott's Original Miscellany- Ben Schott
HISTORY
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire- Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples- Winston Churchill
A History of the Crusades- Steven Runciman
The Histories- Herodotus
The History of the Peloponnesian War- Thucydides
Seven Pillars of Wisdom- T. E. Lawrence
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle- Compiled at King Alfred's behest
A People's Tragedy- Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution- Simon Schama
The Origins of the Second World War- A.J.P. Taylor
LIVES
Confessions- St Augustine
Lives of the Caesars- Suetonius
Lives of the Artists- Vasari
If This is a Man- Primo Levi
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man- Siegfried Sassoon
Eminent Victorians- Lytton Strachey
A Life of Charlotte Brontë- Elizabeth Gaskell
Goodbye to All That- Robert Graves
The Life of Dr Johnson- Boswell Diaries, Alan Clark
Beloved- Toni Morrison
The Human Stain- Philip Roth
ROMANTIC FICTION
Le Morte D'Arthur- Thomas Malory
Les Liasons Dangereuses- Choderlos de Laclos
I, Claudius- Robert Graves
Alexander Trilogy- Mary Renault
Master and Commander- Patrick O'Brian
The Plantagenet Saga- Jean Plaidy
CHILDREN'S BOOKS
Swallows and Amazons- Arthur Ransome
The Lord of the Rings- JRR Tolkein
His Dark Materials- Phillip Pullman
Babar- Jean DeBrunhoff (Although I did love the cartoon!)
Winnie The Pooh- AA Milne
Harry Potter- JK Rowling
The Wind in the Willows- Kenneth Grahame
SCI-FI
Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea- Jules Verne
The Time Machine- HG Wells
1984- George Orwell
The Day of the Triffids- John Wyndham
Foundation- Isaac Asimov
2001: A Space Odyssey- Arthur C Clarke
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?- Philip K Dick
Neuromancer- William Gibson
CRIMEThe Talented Mr Ripley- Patricia Highsmith
The Maltese Falcon- Dashiell Hammett
The Complete Sherlock Holmes- Arthur Conan Doyle
The Big Sleep- Raymond Chandler
Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy- John Le Carre
Red Dragon- Thomas Harris
The Murders in the Rue Morgue- Edgar Allen Poe
The Woman in White- Wilkie Collins (I need to get a copy of this before April though!)
Killshot- Elmore Leonard
BOOKS THAT CHANGED THE WORLD
Das Kapital- Karl Marx
The Rights of Man- Tom Paine
The Social Contract- Jean Jacques Rousseau
Democracy in America- Alexis de Tocqueville
On War- Carlvon Clausewitz
The Prince- Niccolo Machiavelli
Leviathan- Thomas Hobbes
On the Interpretation of Dreams- Sigmund Freud
On the Origin of Species- Charles Darwin
L'Encyclopedie- Diderot, et al
BOOKS THAT CHANGED YOUR WORLD
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance- Robert M Pirsig
Jonathan Livingstone Seagull- Richard Bach
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy- Douglas Adams
The Tipping Point- Malcolm Gladwell
The Beauty Myth- Naomi Wolf
How to Cook- Delia Smith
A Year in Provence- Peter Mayle
Schott's Original Miscellany- Ben Schott
HISTORY
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire- Edward Gibbon
A History of the English-Speaking Peoples- Winston Churchill
A History of the Crusades- Steven Runciman
The Histories- Herodotus
The History of the Peloponnesian War- Thucydides
Seven Pillars of Wisdom- T. E. Lawrence
The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle- Compiled at King Alfred's behest
A People's Tragedy- Orlando Figes
Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution- Simon Schama
The Origins of the Second World War- A.J.P. Taylor
LIVES
Confessions- St Augustine
Lives of the Caesars- Suetonius
Lives of the Artists- Vasari
If This is a Man- Primo Levi
Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man- Siegfried Sassoon
Eminent Victorians- Lytton Strachey
A Life of Charlotte Brontë- Elizabeth Gaskell
Goodbye to All That- Robert Graves
The Life of Dr Johnson- Boswell Diaries, Alan Clark
So, I've read 18 of these books, the majority of those are children's books, but I do have 17 more from the list to read! I do question the list itself though, because there's plenty of shit on it that I have no interest in reading, and it also seems to mainly avoid American authors, whom I read about 90% of the time. So basically, there's obviously nothing wrong with me, and plenty wrong with this list! But seriously- I do severely question a list like this that doesn't include The Republic by Plato...
That's a pretty comprehensive list! It reminds me that I need to get in some more poetry. Shakespeare's Sonnets are so lovely . . .
ReplyDeleteI (finally) posted my answers to your eleven-things tag :)
Yay! Will be checking them out imminently :)
DeleteYES! I did The Secret on that shit!
ReplyDeleteThat list just showed me how lacking my reading has been regarding Important Books, as opposed to the sci-fi or crime genres. Also that I'm the ONLY person to have not finished Frankenstein.
Also AGH abused children books. I will not read them. Ahhhhhhhhh!
You manipulated my mind, didn't you?! ARGH!
DeleteDuuude, Frankenstein is so good! I'm not at all worrying about my lack of reading of this list, because this is a pretty poser-y list, I think!
Abused children books suck. In all the ways.
You haven't read Hitchhikers? what the eff?!!
ReplyDeleteOk, you know how you had those friends who were obsessed with Buffy, and them talking about it all the time made you kind of hate it by association and so you don't know its many complex and wondrous wonders? That's what The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy is all about for me. Having said that, I do want to read it! But I can never find it anywhere (and by anywhere I obviously mean charity shops) for some reason.
DeleteThat's because no one has ever given their copy away! I do have one friend who is OBSESSED but I read it waaay before her obsession started.
DeleteI did watch Buffy when it was on! I just forgot about it once it stopped being on telly.
Ohhhh, I thought you just didn't watch it, and they were all like 'Buffy omg blah blah blah' and it made you hate it without seeing it. BUFFY IS THE BEST DON'T FORGET ABOUT IT EVER!
DeleteAnyway. I do need to read Hitchhikers, but I'm still scarred by all the times I was bored by it. Hmm. This is also why I don't ever want to watch Star Wars ever (damn, my friends were nerds!)
I'm so glad you posted this list! I was hoping others would because I'm curious to see other stats. I'm with you on the Dickinson - she should have been represented in the poetry section.
ReplyDeleteHow did you like Tess of the D'Umbervilles?
Dickinson is the bestest of the best! This list is evil and sexist (maybe)!
DeleteI really really really like Tess of the D'Urbervilles, even though it makes me depressed beyond measure. But I LOVE TESS SO MUCH, and I just want her to be happy!
HOLY CRAP! I finally meet someone else who enjoyed Tess!! I thought I was the only one still alive!!
DeleteI am jealous of Alice!
ReplyDeleteAlso I would like to echo Frances shock and dismay that you've yet to read Hitchhiker's! What is this?
Aww, maybe she'll send it to you once she's done with it! Also, if I find a cheap copy of it I will maybe send it to you because I seem to be unable to leave it in charity shops!
DeleteRe: Hitchhikers, see above! I'm sure it's good, but I've been bored by it in SO many conversations, I'm just kind of like SNORE about it now.
I don't know where you get your books, (indie store, chain store, etc) but I saw a gorgeous Collins Classic edition of The Woman in White at the book depository. I almost bought it for myself and I already have the ebook.
ReplyDeleteOoooh! I am eyeing up the Penguin Clothbound edition of it because, well, I love them and kind of want to marry them. Quiiiite expensive though, so we'll see!
DeleteI thought about doing the same on my blog, but the list is so dodgy!! Some great must-read books are on it, but it's so select and misses out so much important American/Australia/International literature. But anyway, it's always interesting to see how people "score" on these lists, I usually end up feeling a little ashamed!
ReplyDeleteThank you Kayleigh! I definitely don't rate this list that much, although its children's section can't really be argued with ;) hehe. Also, don't feel ashamed ever! There's always time to read more books, and it's never worth reading books that you don't want to, just because you 'should'. That's why I've never read any Dickens!
DeleteUgh! I hate these lists: they make me feel ever so inadequate, which is depressing since I've spent so much of my life reading, I SHOULD HAVE ALREADY READ THESE! Disgust sets in, and well, that's never good.
ReplyDeleteStill, you've got a lot knocked off...
See above re: disgust and shame! And, I shall repeat, I really don't think this is a good list! It's very very poseurish and, well, I can think of so many wonderful books that *aren't* on it. Mainly ALL the American books that it just flagrantly ignores!
Delete