BBC Meme

Oh memes. I usually ignore them, but this one was too fun (got a link to it via Facebook). It's a booklist, ostensibly from the BBC, though I have my doubts.

"The BBC believes most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an 'x' after those you have read.
2) Add a '+' to the ones you LOVE.
3) Add a '- ' to the ones you HATE.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

I'm also going to put an * by the ones I plan to read.

Then tag however many people you want and read their responses:

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen x +
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien x +
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte x +
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling x +
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee x +
6 The Bible x +
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte x +
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell x
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman x
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens x
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott x
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller x -
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (some, not all of them) x +
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier x+
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien x+
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger x +
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger x +
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot *
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams x +
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh x +
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll x
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame x
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis x +
34 Emma - Jane Austen x +
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen x +
36 The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden x
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne x
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown x
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 x
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood x +
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding x
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel x -
52 Dune - Frank Herbert x
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons *
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen x +
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 x
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 x
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt x
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas x
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac *
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding x
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville x
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker x
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett x +
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 x
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 x
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 x
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery x +
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams x
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Beloved - Toni Morrison
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl x
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo x +

Total read: 49


OK. This list looks rather uneven to me. What is The Five People You Meet in Heaven doing next to Sherlock Holmes? I'm getting flashbacks to the Humanities curriculum, which seemed to think five female authors sufficient for a two-year study of literature and history. Anyway. I do have a quite a few classics to read still!

And now, a musical interlude

I have been enjoying my Paste VIP Winter DVD Sampler. The musics videos have been a delight (with a few mediocre numbers -- Matt Costa, I'm talking to you) and I thought I'd share two favourites below. Both song titles start with "How" which is coincidental.

First, one from Greg Laswell:


And then a delightful ditty from The Watson Twins:


Enjoy!