YA Booky thing

[chickenfeet]

From gillo

The Museum, Libraries and Arts Council's list of 30 Books Every Adult Should Have Read. Bold the ones you have read. Italicize the ones you would like to read. Strike out the ones you never plan to read, or started but couldn't finish:


To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks - who he?
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy - I don't think I'ne ever made it all the way through a Hardy.
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran .
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

What an odd list!

Comments

[roadnotes.livejournal.com]

The Lovely Bones? ICK. Serious ICK. That is not a great book, by any stretch of the imagination. They would leave off One Hundred Years of Solitude and Crime and Punishment for that?

[gillo]

Not keen on Dickens, then?

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Not very. Probably less pernicious than anthrax, Trollope and the Black Death.

[gillo]

I like Dickens and Trollope both. Easier and funnier than Henry James and Virginia Woolf...

[thera-flu.livejournal.com]

I definitely recommend His Dark Materials, The Lovely Bones, The Poisonwood Bible. The Bone People is another good one if you're interested and Tess is the most readable of Hardy, imoh.

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I've read The Bone People

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Bloke with a lot of curls (http://www.randomhouse.com.au/authordatabase/Faulks,%20Sebastian.jpg). I took against him on the basis of a book review, so I've never got round to reading any of his work.

PS

[kalypso-v.livejournal.com]

Should clarify, a book review written by him in which I considered he was unnecessarily rude about someone less gifted than himself, not a review attacking one of his books, which I'm told are well written.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

I always thought Far from the Madding Crowd was the most readable Hardy. But then I like Hardy.

[a-d-medievalist.livejournal.com]

Wait -- P&P for Austen? Hardly her best, just the most famous. This really is a weird list. I'm all for Pullman, but what makes any of these "should have reads"?? Except maybe Tolkein and Orwell. I mean, shouldn't we all have read some Wodehouse? I think everybody would be a lot saner if they read more Terry Pratchett. And if it's about being culturally literate ... WTF? No Brave New World, Animal Farm?

Can't do the meme myself -- gave them up for Lent.

[daubentonia.livejournal.com]

Wow, you're not kidding, that's a really really weird list. Coelho's Alchemist? Pop cheese. The Master and Margarita? Great choice!! (I finally read it after forever) The Bible?? Jesus Christ!!

[bopeepsheep.livejournal.com]

Did you c&p this from a list with added remarks? Mark Haddon seems to have gained a 'Good' that isn't part of his name. (As to who he is, nice chap who lives two streets down from my old flat, so about three miles from where I live now. Er... TCIotDitNT is a good book, and I'd recommend it to you. It's about mathematics, Asperger's Syndrome, betrayal, Swindon, and the peculiarities of parents, among other things. Not in that order.)

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

I'll fix that right away

[blonde222.livejournal.com]

imho, too much Dickens by half on this list.


To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran .
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

[chickenfeet2003.livejournal.com]

Solzhenitsyn is worth a look but stick with the early stuff. Denisovich is good, as are Cancer Ward and First Circle. Unfortunately at some point he appears to have gone completely mad.

[popsock.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, more than I thought...

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
The Bible
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy by JRR Tolkien
1984 by George Orwell
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
All Quiet on the Western Front by E M Remarque
His Dark Materials Trilogy by Phillip Pullman
Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night
Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Winnie the Pooh by AA Milne
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Prophet by Khalil Gibran .
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Middlemarch by George Eliot
The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess.
A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzenhitsyn

[lemur-catta.livejournal.com]

That really is one of the stranger lists of its kind that I've seen. They don't even specify excerpts from the Bible, they just plop the whole thing down there as if its ordinary to read it from cover to cover.
Strange strange mix of currently popular, canonical but dull, entirely forgettable (GWTW=WTF?!) and , for me at least, a few never-heard-of-its.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

Faulks is a pretty good writer - Birdsong is a rather moving piece set in the trenches of Paschendal (I think). It did however win an award for the worse written sex scene of the year.

The Curious Incident... is very enjoyable - a quick read, too.

[sweetcharity.livejournal.com]

That was an odd list! Oddly enough I have read almost all the same books as you except for that last one.
I also read ...The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran .

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho.

and

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver