Meme: Read or ... die?

[nebroadwe]

The World Book Day poll conducted by the Museum, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) of Great Britain, which asked librarians, "Which book should every adult read before they die?" has turned up a rather eclectic list. So, here's the usual meme: bold the ones you've read, strike through the ones you started but didn't finish, and comment as inspired.

THE LIST
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Sadly, I must be one of the six Americans on the planet who hasn't read this one. I keep meaning to, but ... And I haven't seen the film, either, even though my grad school roommate taught it in her rhetoric class. Sigh.

The Bible

No, really. I picked it up about the same time I was reading LOTR and must have done the Pentateuch alone eighty times. I loved all the detailed world-building in that; also all the melodrama of the historical books and the Gospels/Acts. Took me much longer to appreciate the Psalms and the epistles.

The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

My favorite book in the world. Bar none.

1984 by George Orwell

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

One of my favorite books to read aloud. It's no wonder so many distinguished actors decide to try it as a one-man show. Even the narrative voice sings.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Which I read before I was assigned it in school. Ha!

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Ditto. Still one of my favorite comfort reads. Everything neatly to scale here, as Miss C. Bronte noted with disgust, but I like neatness and scale when the universe seems too large and out-of-control. Which is why I usually have Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier on in the background at the same time, and save the Debussy and Beethoven for later.

All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque

Picked it up one summer when I was reading Important Books. Can't remember any of it now.

His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman

Frustrating on so many levels. Pullman is a wonderful prose stylist and his world-building is impressive here, but I'm unsympathetic to his thematic point and utterly turned-off by the sledge-hammer approach he takes to propounding it. Then the third book ties itself in knots trying to resolve the metaphysical conundrums and I throw up my hands. Give me the Sally Lockhart trilogy; at least I have more empathy with Pullman's politics there, and can overlook the preachiness.

Birdsong by Sebastian Faulks

Never heard of this one.

The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck

Missed this one, too. My high school's English faculty was a wee bit prejudiced against American literature, so the advanced classes, whose syllabi were not set in stone, read more works from the other side of the pond.

The Lord of the Flies by William Golding

I tried, but it was too depressing. I already knew all about child's inhumanity to child from elementary and grade school, anyway.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon

Tess of the D'urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

Another depressing read, but assigned in some class or other. I survived the experience, but have never felt compelled to repeat it.

Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne

Missed as a child, but read as an adult after reading Christopher Milne's memoirs about being Christopher Robin. The which I also recommend.

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte

Making up for all those Literary Classics I managed to miss in school, I was assigned this one on three different occasions. It takes a true classic not to have the life sucked out of it completely by such an experience. Mind you, I find the "anger management counseling" scene in Jasper Fforde's Well of Lost Plots hysterically funny now.

The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell

Ehh. I had an Eight Deadly Words experience with this one. What a bunch of losers.

Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Enthusiastically recommended to me by any number of people, but I read the first hundred pages and bounced hard. Maybe I've read too many time travel stories to find this one compelling; I suspect a non-genre-reader coming to time travel romance for the first time would be more intrigued.

The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

But not the Qur'an? Or the Bhaghavad Gita? (Both of which I've read in translation.) Or Confucius? Or Marcus Aurelius? Or ... My one "Why this one?" moment with this list.

David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

We did Great Expectations instead. Sue me.

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Augh. Another enthusiastically recommended book that I finished but which left me absolutely cold. I've read serious allegories and symbolic narratives, like The Faerie Queene and The Divine Comedy and even The Pilgrim's Progress, so this seemed almost laughably lightweight. Each to her own, though.

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov

Life of Pi by Yann Martel

Middlemarch by George Eliot

Fun, but long, and I wanted to smack the heroine over her initial bad marriage and everyone else over the subsequent dithering that kept her and the hero from getting together until the end of the story. And smack the Pot of Basil couple on general principles. Sometimes reading about flawed human beings can be frustrating, however wonderfully realistic. (This novel also gave rise to a terrible moment in my doctoral orals, when I was asked to discourse on "George Eliot's Middlemarch, the novel as history and the history of the novel." "Oh, dear," I said, attempting to cover a thought-marshaling moment with humor. "You do want us to be here all day." "No," came the frowning response. "I want you to answer my question." Brr. Fortunately, I remembered Stephen Jay Gould's quotation of Middlemarch in his essay on women's brains and used that tenuous thread to string together a pay-no-attention-to-that-man-behind-the-curtain handwave on the development of the novel paralleling the development of scientific inquiry in the Enlightenment and escaped with a passing grade. Phew.)

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Wow. Depressing, but wonderful, even in translation.

Thus me. Anyone else?