30 Books Every Adult Should Have Read according to some doofuses

[frogworth]

Courtesy ninebelow, this is apparently the Museum, Libraries and Arts Councils of UK's idea of 30 books you just gotta read, man!
As always, bold = read it, italics = own it and/or want to read it.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
The Bible (well, not the whole thing! Haha. And I don't own one. And are you talking about the Christian bible, or the Torah, or...?
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 (I detested it.)
The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Graham (but too long ago to remember much)
Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Time Traveller's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (don't own, would like to read)
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold (as above)
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 (bugger that)
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

Not bad on my part for a list of mostly non-genre classics. As you can see, I've read all the sf/fantasy ones. Blame many of the others on reasonably good schooling, I guess! Although I read the Sozenhitsyn at some family friends' one bored night - it was rather good!

Comments

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

How is it Dickens rates three entries? I suppose I really should get around to reading him one of these days, as he's always very high on these lists, but when I've started his books, I've never been sucked in.

The Time Traveler's Wife is a lovely book. I'm pretty certain I cried in places while reading it, and know other people who reacted the same (though that may be a girl-thing, I dunno). Pride & Prejudice is fun. I didn't read it for years because I assumed it was some stuffy piece of literature, but it's a romance/comedy of manners.

Kingsolver writes some great books. I haven't read The Poisonwood Bible yet, but it's on my list.

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Hello there! We have jaylake in common, yay :)
And you have some good stuff in your interests that I should snarf, whether it's e. e. cummings, used bookstores, or alternative energy etc.

Yeah, Dickens Schmickens, but as you can see I've actually read two of 'em! And I've read Oliver Twist too. Ages ago mind you.
I would love to read The Time Traveler's Wife sometime, and certainly will get on to Ms Austen one of these days... Cool.

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I found you through Mr. Lake, a most entertaining fellow.

My apologies, by the way, for my opinionated late-night rantings about books. I don't usually inflict them on innocent strangers.

Then again, it's possibly a perfectly normal time of day for you, and not two in the morning. I have some friends in Wellington, NZ, and at one point could track where they were in time relative to me, but then daylight savings time went into effect here and I haven't re-programmed my brain.

::bothers to google it::

Ah, yes, it's currently evening there. So, how will my day go?

:)

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Well, it will be reasonably sunny for much of the day, but then the rain will come and it will get quite a lot colder. You will have not been at work because it's ANZAC Day (Australia & New Zealand Army Corps, that is, commemoration of our army's routing in various military battles haha)...
It will occur to you at some time during the day that this is very strange for downtown San Francisco. You will ponder whether you are in fact living in a Philip K Dick novel.

I believe you mean, by the way, that daylight savings time went went out of effect (he says in a spectacularly unidiomatic use of English) in NZ, unless they have a somewhat different Southern Hemisphere across the Tasman...

[plantgirl.livejournal.com]

Ah, yes, I had that as part of the sentence and then cut it. Into effect here, out of effect there, so instead of a 20 hour difference between myself & Wellington, there's now 22 hours. (Assuming I have enough of a brain at 2:00 am to be doing this sort of math, something which is highly questionable). So you're in Sydney, and ... 17 hours ahead of me? (I'm actually in Concord (http://maps.yahoo.com/maps_result?addr=&csz=concord%2C+ca&country=us&new=1&name=&qty=), by the way, a boring city East of Berkeley). 17 hours is one of those chunks of time that makes interacting difficult. I have friends in Chang Mai (Thailand), which is 14 hours different, and if we want to talk on the phone someone either has to stay up late or get up early. Frustrating.

Speaking of the future, I actually have to get up in the morning, and am heading off to bed now.

But 'twas nice to 'meet' you. :)

[frogworth.livejournal.com]

Yep, 17 hours is waaay silly, and makes for genuine jetlag as well.
Hello Concord! *waves*

Nice to meet you too. Sleep well. Dinner time for us now!