This is one of those things traveling around the internet. I got it from MaryP. (She has it as a nice table; I can’t figure out how to do that. Drat.) Pass it on at will.
Take the list below, paste it into your own blog, and mark them as follows:
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READ for those you’ve read;
WANT TO next to those you are interested in;
AGAIN & AGAIN next to those you’ve read and loved, over and over;
REPEAT for those you’ve read more than once, without necessarily loving them;
MEH for stuff you read and weren’t impressed by;
STARTED for those that just never got finished; and leave blank those you don’t care to read.
Those are the ratings from the meme as I received it; I also used “Ugh!” for things I hated (beyond meh), “?” for things I’ve never heard of, and “Never” for things I wouldn’t read if you paid me. I’ll explain some of those below the list.
Title Rating
1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) Again and again
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) Again and again
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) Read
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien) Read; ugh!
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien) Started; ugh!
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien) Started; ugh!
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) ?
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) ?
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling) Read
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling) Read
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) Read
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden) ?
16. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (Rowling) Read
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald) ?
18. The Stand (Stephen King) Never
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling) Read
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) Again and again
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien) Read
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) Read
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) Read
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) Read; loved but haven’t read again
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) Read
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) Read
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) Meh
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) Read
31. Dune (Frank Herbert) Repeat
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) Read
34. 1984 (Orwell) Read
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) Meh
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) ?
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay) ?
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb) Read
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) Meh
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella) ?
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) Read
45. The Bible Read (much of it; varies from “again and again” to Ugh!)
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy) Read (most of it)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) Read
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) Again and again
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb) Read
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) Read
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card) Read
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence) Repeat
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling) Read
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough) Meh
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood) Meh
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) ?
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) Started
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) Read
63. War and Peace (Tolsoy) Read
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis) ?
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) Again and again
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares) ?
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) Again and again and again
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) Read
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) Started
73. Shogun (James Clavell) Read
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett) Read
76. Tigana (Guy Gavriel Kay) ?
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith) Read
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving) Read
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence) ?
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White) Read
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley) ?
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) Read
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) Read
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind) ?
85. Emma (Jane Austen) Read
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams) Read
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) Read
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields) ?
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago) ?
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer) ?
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje) ?
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding) Meh
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck) Read
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd) Read
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) Meh
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton) ?
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch) ?
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford) ?
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield) Never
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) Never
A few elaborations:
THE RING TRILOGY: I hated the Ring trilogy. This was unique in my circles; it was universally loved by everyone I knew. (This was back in the late sixties.) It didn’t go anywhere; it was the same old thing, over and over and over, ad nauseum. I read all of the first one, about half of the second, and maybe 10% of the last (skipped to the end just to see it finally resolved.) The power of peer pressure, I guess, or at least of the respect in which I held my friends, that I persisted that much, together with the fact that I had read and enjoyed The Hobbit.
When the movies came out, I went to the first because a friend wanted to see it, and the third, again with friends. The movies were extremely well done; the scenery and special effects were spectacular (both literally and metaphorically, it occurs to me.) At the beginning of the first, I was doing OK, and remember thinking I couldn’t remember why I had hated the trilogy so much; then, well into it, in the middle of yet another extended battle scene, I remembered. Talk about gratuitous violence! My whole brain and being went into rebellion; I had had it with all the bashing. So I hunkered down, closed my eyes, and did my best to tune out through most of the rest of the bashing (in both movies). It’s probably a good thing Tolkien had the outlet of writing–it must have been hard to live in his head.
CATCH-22, on the other hand, I loved. I must have read it 11 or 12 times before it lost it’s oomph for me. And its been long enough since the last time, I could probably read it again now with pleasure. I love that you can start anywhere—open it at random—and read from there, then go back to the beginning and read up to where you started, and it all works.
THE STAND, by Stephen King. I’m not much into horror, movies or books, but after seeing The Green Mile, I decided to try his books. After a couple, I decided “never again!”. The man is a lousy writer. The movies must have been saved by the Hollywood script writers (kinda like Forrest Gump; whatever you may have thought of the movie, it’s better than the book, which is awful.) I know millions read King with pleasure, but I can’t get past the bad writing to the story.
THE CELESTINE PROPHECY. I’m not sure exactly why I can’t stomach it. I’ve picked it up many times, read a page or two, thinking I should give it a fair shot. Some of my good friends love it and have found wisdom in it. But every time, my gut rebels, I go “Yuck, nope, not today” and put it down. So I’ve given up; I’m just never gonna read it.
ANNA KARENINA. I tried this back in high school. I was going through a phase of trying to get over my reverse snobbery and give classics a chance. It’s a bit of a fog to me, but it seemed to go nowhere a lot (likely at 16 I was too young to understand it). I got up to about 30 pages from the end, and asked my mother, who had read it and loved it, “doesn’t anything ever happen?” She said, “Well, no, not really”, so I put the book down and never finished it.
WAR AND PEACE, on the other hand, I did manage to get through, and by the end even understood why it was considered a great book. It was hard work, and I don’t think I’ll ever make the effort again (it took me the first half of the book to sort out who the various characters were; it would kill Russians to use the same names, or at least recognizable variants of them, throughout for a given character?), but it was definitely worth one time through.
ULYSSES I’ve looked at a time or two, but I’ll just have to trust those who say it’s a great book. Way too much work for me. I can barely make it through a short poem, so making it through an entire novel, and a long one at that, of elliptical references and seriously non-linear thought—my brain’s just not up to it. Maybe if someone actually paid me, if they paid me enough—but that’s not gonna happen, so it will remain a closed book to me.
Addofio 
I am an English major, and apart from a prof, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who a) read all of Ulysses and b) enjoyed it. You move in rarified circles!
You’d remember Time Traveller’s Wife if you’d read it, I think. It’s the one that’s astonishing in its structure – the narrator is plagued by a bizarre medical condition that has him leaping hither and yon through time, and gradually the mystery of his own appearance in his wife’s life, and subsequent disappearance, is revealed. I can’t imagine how the author kept it straight! I’m envisioning really complex flow charts and lots of sticky notes.
Re: Anna K: You quit thirty pages from the end?? I’m long past finishing a book just because I started it – but thirty pages from the end? Wow.
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Oh, and if you want to know how to do a table, I can show you the html (which Stephen showed me) – but it’s fiddly! Particularly for a chart with a hundred rows. Very, very fiddly. Phew.
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lol. Remember, (re: Anna K), I was only 16, and I wanted something to happen. All that agonizing over feelings and whatever (I honestly don’t remember it much at all) just bored me–seemed so pointless. Mom said nothing was going to happen–so why read any more? I can be very literal-minded.
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Stephen King is a very uneven writer. A scant few of the books are brilliant, many are a great ride, most I won’t bother with. The Stand is the best of the bunch, IMO.
I’m one of those people who think Ulysses is a truly great novel, but I’ll admit I’ve never started and finished it (though I’ve probably read all of it, or very nearly so, in pieces). It’s really taxing to read.
Things do happen in Anna K., but like all the literature of the time and place, there’s so much description, it’s a slog to find the action. And BOY do I agree about the names! I read The Brothers Karamazov a couple of years ago, and I had to keep a paper next to me for the first 300 pages, on which I listed each character and all the names Dostoyevsky uses for him.
I loved Time Traveller’s Wife (but it’s love-or-hate, from what I hear). Also The Red Tent, The Kite Runner, and The English Patient (much better than the movie).
You didn’t like The Handmaid’s Tale? I just ordered it because I’ve heard so much about it, I want to be able to discuss it. And it sounded intriguing. Now I’m second guessing the order. 😦 Oh well, it certainly won’t be the last book that disappoints me.
This was great fun! Thanks.
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As I said, I find that people’s taste in books is very idiosyncratic (sp?)–you’ll probably love The Handmaid’s Tale. I’ve read others of her books I liked better. It’s not that it’s not a good book, exactly–I just didn’t care much for it. It’s well-written, and thought-provoking.
Keep in mind I’m a bit of a philistine; I go more for story and characters than for language. Snow Falling on Cedars, which I have just enough artistic sense to recognize as very well-written, was mostly a big yawn to me. I skipped over most of the lovely poetic description, looking for the action. Horse Heaven, by Jane Smiley, on the other hand, I loved. On the other other hand, A Thousand Acres, also by Jane Smiley, is an excellent book, very well-written, but I would rate it with a Meh because it left a sour taste in my mouth, metaphorically. Go figure. Also, the rating–as with any rating system–lacks nuance.
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I’m not a huge Atwood fan, though I’ve read a few of her books. Some I loathed (Oryx and Crake), while others I enjoyed enough to read a second time. The Handmaid’s Tale was one such. It didn’t thrill and delight, but it’s an interesting story.
But The English Patient? Urgh. I enjoyed the first 40 pages, and then I started to bog down. I read a further 70 pages or so, and then just couldn’t force myself one. word. further. I quite enjoyed the movie though – usually the reverse of my experience!
Which is only to say that, as you said, people’s taste in books is idiosyncratic. When two people, whose opinions I respect, have completely opposite responses to a book, it makes me even more curious about it!
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[…] at which you gave it up. Something like, “Quit, page 47 of 322″. Or, if you’re Addofio, “Quit, page 752 of […]
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[…] note the page at which you gave it up. Something like, “Quit, page 47 of 322″. Or, if you’re Addofio, “Quit, page 752 of 782.” No, you may not include books you read to your children – unless […]
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[…] note the page at which you gave it up. Something like, “Quit, page 47 of 322″. Or, if you’re Addofio, “Quit, page 752 of 782.” No, you may not include books you read to your children – unless […]
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Thank You
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