Booklist meme

[thisbluespirit]

I usually ignore these, but, oh well, why not? I'm a little bored tonight. So, in what seems to be a sort of updated version of the BBC's Big Read list (with a mystery missing no. 19. I think I shall add in something I like. *evil*). Taken from justice_turtle:

There were rules, but I'm just going to bold the ones I've actually read, and make any relevant notes next to any of the others. I find predicting what I will or won't read in the future is unreliable. I think someone reckons the average most people will have read is 6. I think that's a bit pessimistic. I also, since I nicked it of JT, put in the full list of Carnegie winners as a contrast to the Newbery list. (They are the UK and US equivalents - the Newbery came first, though.)


01. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
05. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06. The Bible
07. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
08. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
09. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare (I've read some, but not all. One day, though.)
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith (I randomly put this in; I'm sure it was in the original Big Read list, and I like it. I might do a 100 Things post for it next.)
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (I did see the film once - you don't expect me to read the book as well, do you?)
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky (See, a classic example of what you might find yourself reading unexpectedly. Oh, my. I liked it a lot. It wasn't all to do with the fact that it honestly has David Collings in. I did like it anyway.)
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (I am really not 1005 I've actually read it, other than watching that stop-motion(?) animated version that was very scary when I was young, and Ladybird books. But I am about 95% I did finally at some point read it.)
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. 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 - A.A. Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (This book has enough readers and doesn't need me.)
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins (Yes! Marian! Count Fosco! Singing with mice! Oh, no, wait - that bit was only in the musical. Although it is a little odd that this is here rather than The Moonstone, really.)
46. Anne of Green Gables - L.M. 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 (I started this once, but it was somebody else's book and I couldn't borrow it.)
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? I am really not sure whether I've read this or not. I think I did. But I am not sure whether I did, or just watched the film and decided I would never read it.
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 (No. We were forced to do The Pearl for English once. I vowed after never to read another John Steinbeck again. But i was 14, perhaps I was a little hasty?)
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy (This book needs big warnings all over it. Thomas Hardy, what were you thinking?)
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 - A.S. 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 - E.B. 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 - 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

I make that 51. Not bad. Especially given that they fill these lists up with depressing gigantic books that most people spend their lives trying to avoid. (Moby Dick, Ulysses, War and Peace, Les Miserables?) I'm sure Don Quixote is normally on these lists, and I've read that. But it's not depressing enough for people, is it?



Carnegie winners
(Awarded for outstanding writing in a children's book).

2012 Patrick Ness, A Monster Calls
2011 Patrick Ness, Monsters of Men
2010 Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book
2009 Siobhan Dowd, Bog Child
2008 Philip Reeve, Here Lies Arthur
2007 Meg Rosoff, Just in Case
2005 Mal Peet, Tamar
2004 Frank Cottrell Boyce, Millions
2003 Jennifer Donnelly, A Gathering Light (I was actually on the panel of judges for this and Ruby Holler, below. See, I once had a life. It had some incredibly interesting bits in it.)
2002 Sharon Creech, Ruby Holler
2001 Terry Pratchett, The Amazing Maurice and his Educated Rodents
2000 Beverley Naidoo, The Other Side of Truth
1999 Aidan Chambers, Postcards From No Man's Land
1998 David Almond, Skellig
1997 Tim Bowler, River Boy
1996 Melvin Burgess, Junk
1995 Philip Pullman, His Dark Materials: Book 1 Northern Lights
1994 Theresa Breslin, Whispers in the Graveyard
1993 Robert Swindells, Stone Cold
1992 Anne Fine, Flour Babies
1991 Berlie Doherty, Dear Nobody
1990 Gillian Cross, Wolf
1989 Anne Fine, Goggle-eyes
1988 Geraldine McCaughrean, A Pack of Lies
1987 Susan Price, The Ghost Drum
1986 Berlie Doherty, Granny was a Buffer Girl
1985 Kevin Crossley-Holland, Storm (This is a banana book, believe it or not. A yellow banana.)
1984 Margaret Mahy, The Changeover, Dent
1983 Jan Mark, Handles
1982 Margaret Mahy, The Haunting (I wanted to read this a lot, but could never find it.)
1981 Robert Westall, The Scarecrows
1980 Peter Dickinson, City of Gold
1979 Peter Dickinson, Tulku
1978 David Rees, The Exeter Blitz
1977 Gene Kemp, The Turbulent Term of Tyke Tiler (Yes. I am a bad children's librarian, sorry.)
1976 Jan Mark, Thunder and Lightnings
1975 Robert Westall, The Machine Gunners (Also. I know. Bad children's librarian.)
1974 Mollie Hunter, The Stronghold
1973 Penelope Lively, The Ghost of Thomas Kempe
1972 Richard Adams, Watership Down
1971 Ivan Southall, Josh (I read all of his books I could find; I can't absolutely remember if this was one - I think it was, though.)
1970 Leon Garfield & Edward Blishen, The God Beneath the Sea
1969 K M Peyton, The Edge of the Cloud (Although Flambards, what was that? Christina married everyone before the end...)
1968 Rosemary Harris, The Moon in the Cloud
1967 Alan Garner, The Owl Service (His best book, I think, so I'm glad it won.)
1966 Prize withheld as no book considered suitable
1965 Philip Turner, The Grange at High Force
1964 Sheena Porter, Nordy Bank
1963 Hester Burton, Time of Trial
1962 Pauline Clarke, The Twelve and the Genii (I'd have liked to have read this; it's about the Brontes.)
1961 Lucy M Boston, A Stranger at Green Knowe
1960 Dr I W Cornwall, The Making of Man
1959 Rosemary Sutcliff, The Lantern Bearers (I'm not 100% sure again, but I think I did. But I didn't read The Eagle of the Ninth, or The Silver Branch. Which is why I'm not sure, because that seems odd. However, about 98% sure I read The Lantern Bearers anyway. And liked it.)
1958 Philipa Pearce, Tom's Midnight Garden
1957 William Mayne, A Grass Rope
1956 C S Lewis, The Last Battle
1955 Eleanor Farjeon, The Little Bookroom
1954 Ronald Welch, Knight Crusader
1953 Edward Osmond, A Valley Grows Up
1952 Mary Norton, The Borrowers
1951 Cynthia Harnett, The Woolpack
1950 Elfrida Vipont Foulds, The Lark on the Wing
1949 Agnes Allen, The Story of Your Home,
1948 Richard Armstrong, Sea Change
1947 Walter De La Mare, Collected Stories for Children
1946 Elizabeth Goudge, The Little White Horse (Somebody gave me this recently, so maybe, finally!)
1945 Prize withheld as no book considered suitable
1944 Eric Linklater, The Wind on the Moon, Macmillan
1943 Prize withheld as no book considered suitable
1942 'BB' The Little Grey Men (Does anybody actually read this book? It used to sit in the library, and when I finally got rid of it, someone requested it and we had to buy another. Which sat there for years and years. So I haven't read it, but I glare at it professionally.)
1941 Mary Treadgold, We Couldn't Leave Dinah
1940 Kitty Barne, Visitors from London
1939 Eleanor Doorly, Radium Woman
1938 Noel Streatfeild, The Circus is Coming
1937 Eve Garnett, The Family from One End Street
1936 Arthur Ransome, Pigeon Post

A lot of the recent ones I read for work. Other than that I have been a bit rubbish at reading them. But there were a lot of depressing ones in the 70s and 80s, you know. Life is short.

Comments

[justice-turtle.livejournal.com]

Ooh, you should try to get hold of "The Twelve and the Genii" sometime if you feel up to it. Hopefully our conservation-of-liking thing only applies to drama, because I love that book, and it is also really good. ;-)

On another note, unless you're actually reading Moby Dick at the same time I am, I think you missed deleting my parenthetical note on it... ;P

[thisbluespirit]

It was OOP for years - I only discovered what it was about when Jane Nissen books reprinted it, but I bet it's still not that easy to get hold of. Oh, I'm sure. It sounds great.

Also, The GHost of Thomas Kempe is good. I haven't read it for years, so take that as a disclaimer, but it was one of her best, I think. Other than The Driftway, which is a bit timey-wimey and dreamlike (I should probably reread that).

And, LOL. Whoops!! There's always one bit you miss when you copy and paste, isn't there? I even managed to weed out the last unwanted asterisk... (I could pretend I am freakily reading it alongside you, but it's not true.)

[john_amend_all]

If I were to do this, which I don't intend to, I'd come up against a dilemma with A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens; I haven't read the original, but surely it still counts if it's been condensed to a Ladybird book? :-)

1942 'BB' The Little Grey Men (Does anybody actually read this book? It used to sit in the library, and when I finally got rid of it, someone requested it and we had to buy another. Which sat there for years and years. So I haven't read it, but I glare at it professionally.)

I've read it. Once. Having previously read the sequel, which I chiefly remember for its protagonists' mile-wide blind spot regarding fire safety.

[thisbluespirit]

:loL: No, I don't think Ladybird books or other similar things count!

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

It's a book I'd be interested to read, largely because Sir Pterry cites it as an influence on the Nac Mac Feegle (Sir Pterry has, of course, read everything).

[pitry.livejournal.com]

1942 'BB' The Little Grey Men (Does anybody actually read this book? It used to sit in the library, and when I finally got rid of it, someone requested it and we had to buy another. Which sat there for years and years. So I haven't read it, but I glare at it professionally.)

which should teach you not to get rid of books! Yeah, I know, libraries have limited space and have to get rid of books. But but but but but!

(Also, they don't need to read it, they can watch the TV adaptation!)

[thisbluespirit]

There are copyright libraries for keeping everything. The only way a public library could keep everything they own would be to never buy any new books and for nobody to read the ones they have. Which would defeat the object.

I didn't normally persecute books like that. It was just that one got the classic exception, and I didn't feel it deserved it. (Is it Little Women, E Nesbit, Treasure Island or Alice, or something? No.) Besides, sometimes you are only removing books to send them to other libraries - many of our branches are so tiny, it's important to do that. And if people want us to keep things, they should borrow them more. And then we will. We get so tied to being judged by issue figures alone, and it really isn't the whole picture.

[pitry.livejournal.com]

I know, I know... and everything you say makes perfect sense.... I just... it breaks my heart when I see libraries throw away books/ put them up on the "take them!!" shelf (although that way is better than throwing them away. That's what the HUJI library did. Every once in a while they'd prune out books and put them on this cart with a big sign saying gift books.). I guess I'm just worried one day I'll find in those piles something that is dear to me. ;)

It's the same with private collections, really. My parents have this huge library and at some point they ran out of space so they had to get rid of some books. I rescued a few but there were so many and the library didn't want them. :(

[thisbluespirit]

Well, most of the time when we weed books we are doing the following: if in good condition, transfering them to other branches, replacing with new copies if tatty, and what has to go is put for sale to earn us more pennies to buy new books.

If you work with books in that context, you have to acknowledge that some books are ephemeral - they're popular and then they date/lose popularity. (If I walked into a public library that was full of tatty books and still had Sweet Valley High on the shelf, I would not be impressed, I can tell you).

It is only in very rare cases as when every page has fallen out, or someone has kindly spilt something all over the whole thing that we will actually throw a book away. And even then we'll try and recycle it. (You see, librarians by nature, are people who keep things. If we're throwing it away, there's usually a reason.)

Plus, while things are getting worse and we're losing a lot of things, you would normally have 'the stacks' where you keep last copies (especially NF, but also some Fiction that can't be replaced) and there are things like the Joint Fiction Reserve where each local authority covers a section of the alphabet (we had some of the Fi-Fls and Frs) and buys every novel published by authors falling under that category and keep them so that any fiction book will be somewhere, and non-fiction will be covered by the British Lending Library.

Things are Not Good right now, and many authorities will be losing these, but trust me. Librarians are careful about what they get rid of, and mostly we just set them free to be bought and go onto new and happy lives elsewhere. :-)

[daibhid-c.livejournal.com]

When I was a trainee at Highland Library Services, part of my job was disposing of books that weren't in good enough condition to sell, or even give away. A few of them ended up in my bag, rather than the recycler.

[pitry.livejournal.com]

♥

[pitry.livejournal.com]

*has been educated* and yeah, I know things aren't good for libraries. And hurrah! For setting them free :D

(If I walked into a public library that was full of tatty books and still had Sweet Valley High on the shelf, I would not be impressed, I can tell you).

Huh. Reminds me a bit of the SF shelf in the library where I grew up. It had a bunch of old books which no one ever checked out. And not SF classics - the really trashy SF no one cares about. It was obvious it was not a very well groomed shelf, which always made me a bit sad. :(

[thisbluespirit]

And, um, often I may have personally set them free, taken them home and liberated them from their repressive dust jackets and unwanted bits of labelling, with tender loving care, and set them upon my own bookshelf, where I don't mind tatty books. :lol:

Yes, you see. You just cannot keep everything and have nice-looking shelves. (Actually, the amount of times the result of weeding a lot of old books has been to have someone come up and say "I see you've got some new books in..." :lol:)

[pitry.livejournal.com]

And, um, often I may have personally set them free, taken them home and liberated them from their repressive dust jackets and unwanted bits of labelling, with tender loving care, and set them upon my own bookshelf, where I don't mind tatty books. :lol:

♥ ♥ ♥ you are my new personal hero :D

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

I am really not 1005

I had to read that twice before I realised you'd meant to type "100%" instead!! o_O

I could do this list - I've read loads of them.

[thisbluespirit]

Well. I'm really not 1005, either, any more than I am 100%. :-)

Oh, I bet you have.

[persiflage-1.livejournal.com]

LOL Well I know you're not 1005 - that's why I was puzzled by your assertion that you weren't - until I twigged!

:D

[scifi-mel.livejournal.com]

What was your problem with Jude the Obscure? It was the first Hardy I read and I really loved it. I must admit I much preferred it to Tess which I didn't care for that much.

[thisbluespirit]

Well, Tess I studied for A-Level, so I came to love it very much (although more for being an amazingly beautiful prose poem on the metaphorical rape of the countryside than for the actual story itself, which is full of people who annoy me), but Jude? I read several Hardy novels and that was my stopping point - as it was for him with his critics back in the day. I know Hardy is depressing, but, really there are limits. The adopted son commits suicide and kills the two children? I think I actually stopped reading it at that point. There are limits to how depressing you can get and still have me as a reader.

But, I mean, he was a very interesting writer and an amazing poet, so I don't blame people for liking Jude. It just goes down as No. 1 Most Depressing Book I Ever Read. (But I probably haven't been trying very hard to give it competition.)

[scifi-mel.livejournal.com]

Lols I love depressing books! I just loved all the insight into his mind and the ways he was thinking about life and the way the world worked at the end of the 19th century and trying to figure out who he was and where he was going. Whereas Tess was definitely full of annoying people. I'm afraid I'm not much one for English poetry though. The meter always over rides everything else when I'm trying to read it and I find it far too distracting and artifical to actually enjoy the words.

[clocketpatch]

I'm not sure why it has the Complete Works of Shakespeare and Hamlet listed separately but then again it's also missing nineteen.


Great list though and I'm keeping it bookmarked for future reference. I actually bought Skellig a few years ago after your recommendation and enjoyed it immensely.

[thisbluespirit]

Yes, and it has The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lion, the Witch and The Wardrobe. Very strange. I think it's a list that's been meddled with as it traversed the 'net!

Aw. I'm always reccing things, but yeah, I can imagine you and Skellig being a good match. I'm not so sure about some of his other books, but he does always write in that rather amazingly terse and poetic style. (I also very much liked Kit's Wilderness.)

Some day I should do a list of YA/children's book I think are great, and not anybody else's! Heh. ;-)

*hugs Clocket just because*

[belantana.livejournal.com]

I would do this list if it had an option for "haven't read this book but read another by the same author and it was so dreadful/boring/depressing that I have no intention of ever reading this one".

That said, I'm impressed by your total!

[thisbluespirit]

:lol: Everybody else adapted this meme quite a bit, so you could add the option!

I went on a Classic reading spree as a teenager that stands me in good stead for these things. And I enjoyed it. It's the depressing modern ones I tend to avoid.