Thursday 5 June 2008

Booked for life

Tag
Ludwig is pressurising me about this one. So here goes..

Procedure:The following is apparently a list of books, "most of them sitting unread in people's bookshelves to make them look smarter". The rules are: bold the ones that you have read, underline the ones you have read in school, italicize the ones you have started but didn't finish.
One doubt. School = high school and earlier, or in the American sense, college? We will assume former. (Says Ludwig, and so do I)

I have very very few books on my shelf that I have not read, so there! HMPH. Regarding many of the classics, I have read most of them, but it has been EONS ago, so I cannot remember whether it was a real good version that I read or a vaguely Disney-fied version. And, of course, there are this toddler versions of stuff that I have read now to the monster - all in all very confused in old age about these things. I don’t know whether to leave it, italicize it, or bold it, so, in line with my general philosophy of life, I just leave it. Unless I am sure… I also have trouble remembering the titles of the Marquez books that I have read and the ones I have been hopelessly looking for at Crossword for the past three years. So don’t hold me to that!


1. Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
2. Anna Karenina
3. Crime and Punishment
4. Catch-22
5. One Hundred Years of Solitude (I think!)
6. Wuthering Heights
7. The Silmarillion
8. Life of Pi: a novel
9. The Name of the Rose
10. Don Quixote
11. Moby Dick
12. Ulysses
13. Madame Bovary
14. The Odyssey
15. Pride and Prejudice
16. Jane Eyre
17. The Tale of Two Cities
18. The Brothers Karamazov
19. Guns, Germs and Steel
20. War and Peace
21. Vanity Fair
22. The Time Traveler's Wife
23. The Iliad
24. Emma
25. The Blind Assasin
26. The Kite Runner
27. Mrs. Dalloway
28. Great Expectations
29. American Gods
30. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
31. Atlas Shrugged
32. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
33. Memoirs of a Geisha
34. Middlesex
35. Quicksilver
36. Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
37. The Canterbury Tales
38. The Historian: A Novel
39. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
40. Love in the Time of Cholera
41. Brave New World
42. The Fountainhead
43. Foucault's Pendulum
44. Middlemarch
45. Frankenstein
46. The Count of Monte Cristo
47. Dracula
48. A Clockwork Orange
49. Anansi Boys
50. The Once and Future King
51. The Grapes of Wrath
52. The Poisonwood Bible
53. 1984
54. Angels and Demons
55. Inferno
56. The Satanic Verses
57. Sense and Sensibility
58. The Picture of Dorian Gray
59. Mansfield Park
60. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
61. To the Lighthouse
62. Tess of the D'Urbervilles
63. Oliver Twist
64. Gulliver's Travels
65. Les Miserables
66. The Correction
67. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
68. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
69. Dune
70. The Prince
71. The Sound and the Fury
72. Angela's Ashes: A Memoir
73. The God of Small Things
74. A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
75. Cryptonomicon
76. Neverwhere
77. A Confederacy of Dunces
78. A Short History of Nearly Everything
79. Dubliners
80. The Unbearable Lightness of Being
81. Beloved
82. Slaughter House- five
83. The Scarlett Letter
84. Eats, Shoots and Leaves
85. The Mists of Avalon
86. Oryx and Crake8
7. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
88. Cloud Atlas
89. The Confusion
90. Lolita
91. Persuasion
92. Northanger Abbey
93. The Catcher in the Rye
94. On the Road
95. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
96. Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
97. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Enquiry into Values
98. The Aeneid
99. Watership Down
100. Gravity's Rainbow
101. The Hobbit
102. In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
103. White Teeth
104. Treasure Island
105. David Copperfield
106. The Three Musketeers

So, to the best of my memory, this is it. My list. Aspirationally, I am going to buy up classics & read them. I did used to enjoy them a lot, whatever versions I could lay my hands on in my youth... As regards showing off to the world how well read I am, well, surely I would fare much worse if the books were engineering ones, so that is what is strange about my list!

And here goes the next tag.

Rules:

1. Pick up nearest book

2. Turn to page 123

3. Find the fifth sentence

4. Post next three sentences

5. Acknowledge who tagged you, and pass the tag along

The book is 'Self' by Yann Martel (the Life of Pi fellow). The book is sli-sha weird but I got a real funky message out of it. The message is for later. Pages 123 aaraam-se it has. Five sentences on page 123 are more tough. OOh but the next lines are totally apt:

This preluded by PMS so bad they circled at least one day a month when they would "disconnect from reality". This is an arduous feminine normality. It would push anyone to worship the goddess Anaprox.

After hoping that Mr.Martel does not sue me or something, I will say that this is relevant because of the recent debate on periods and practices related to it that the blogosphere has seen. As punishment for not expressing my strong views on that matter then, I have stumbled upon these lines in this book! There is plenty about periods and bleeding and so on in the book so I suppose it was reasonably likely. But the real reason I picked this book is that it was lying on the CPU just now (which is my 'safe' place for the library books I mean to return shortly; at least for now).

Okay folks. Please consider yourself tagged if you have the tools to copy paste. :-)

2 comments:

Serious Lounger said...

does this mean i am tagged - i can spew my usual venom on things.. hehe..

Preeti Aghalayam aka kbpm said...

sl- tagged yes. venom-wise the opportunities are less in this tag don't you think? but you can tell us whether you are the man we call when we have a quiz question about, say, Ayn Rand or Jane Austen. :-)