I was wondering how well my own library and reading habits stacked up.
Pretty poorly it turns out. And I consider myself widely, if not well, read.
And yet this is how my results turn out. If I've read it, it's italicized. If I've got it, it's in bold. So this means?
| Title | By | Notes: |
| The Iliad and The Odyssey | Homer | Long. |
| The Barchester Chronicles | Anthony Trollope | |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | |
| Gulliver's Travels | Jonathan Swift | |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Brontë | |
| War and Peace | Tolstoy | |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | |
| Middlemarch | George Eliot | |
| Sonnets | Shakespeare | |
| Divine Comedy | Dante | |
| Canterbury Tales | Chaucer | |
| The Prelude | William Wordsworth | |
| Odes | John Keats | |
| The Waste Land | T. S. Eliot | |
| Paradise Lost | John Milton | |
| Songs of Innocence and Experience | William Blake | |
| Collected Poems | W. B. Yeats | |
| Collected Poems | Ted Hughes | |
| The Portrait of a Lady | Henry James | |
| A la recherche du temps perdu | Proust | |
| Ulysses | James Joyce | Has anybody actually read this? Liar |
| For Whom the Bell Tolls | Ernest Hemingway | |
| Sword of Honour trilogy | Evelyn Waugh | |
| The Ballad of Peckham Rye | Muriel Spark | |
| Rabbit series | John Updike | |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel García Márquez | |
| Beloved | Toni Morrison | |
| The Human Stain | Philip Roth | How 'bout Portnoy's Complaint instead? |
| Rebecca | Daphne du Maurier | |
| Le Morte D'Arthur | Thomas Malory | |
| Les Liaisons Dangereuses | Choderlos de Laclos | |
| I, Claudius | Robert Graves | |
| Alexander Trilogy | Mary Renault | |
| Master and Commander | Patrick O'Brian | |
| Gone with the Wind | Margaret Mitchell | |
| Dr Zhivago | Boris Pasternak | |
| Tess of the D'Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | |
| The Plantagenet Saga | Jean Plaidy | |
| Swallows and Amazons | Arthur Ransome | |
| The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe | C.S. Lewis | The movie blew. |
| The Lord of the Rings | J.R. R. Tolkien | A dozen times. |
| His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | Over-rated. |
| Babar | Jean de Brunhoff | |
| The Railway Children | E. Nesbit | |
| Winnie-the-Pooh | A.A. Milne | |
| Harry Potter | J.K. Rowling | |
| The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | |
| Treasure Island | Robert Louis Stevenson | |
| Frankenstein | Mary Shelley | |
| The Time Machine | H.G. Wells | |
| Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea | Jules Verne | |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | |
| 1984 | George Orwell | |
| The Day of the Triffids | John Wyndham | |
| Foundation | Isaac Asimov | |
| 2001: A Space Odyssey | Arthur C. Clarke | |
| Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? | Philip K. Dick | |
| Neuromancer | William Gibson | |
| The Talented Mr Ripley | Patricia Highsmith | |
| The Maltese Falcon | Dashiell Hammett | |
| The Complete Sherlock Holmes | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | I've read a couple of them, but the complete? |
| The Big Sleep | Raymond Chandler | |
| Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy | John le Carré | |
| Red Dragon | Thomas Harris | Manhunter is one of my favourite movies. |
| Murder on the Orient Express | Agatha Christie | |
| The Murders in the Rue Morgue | Edgar Allan Poe | |
| The Woman in White | Wilkie Collins | |
| Killshot | Elmore Leonard | |
| Das Kapital | Karl Marx | |
| The Rights of Man | Tom Paine | |
| The Social Contract | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | |
| Democracy in America | Alexis de Tocqueville | |
| On War | Carl von Clausewitz | |
| The Prince | Niccolo Machiavelli | |
| Leviathan | Thomas Hobbes | |
| On the Interpretation of Dreams | Sigmund Freud | |
| On the Origin of Species | Charles Darwin | |
| L'Encyclopédie | Diderot, et al | |
| Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance | Robert M. Pirsig | |
| Jonathan Livingston Seagull | Richard Bach | |
| The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | |
| The Tipping Point | Malcolm Gladwell | |
| The Beauty Myth | Naomi Wolf | |
| How to Cook | Delia Smith | |
| A Year in Provence | Peter Mayle | |
| A Child Called 'It' | Dave Pelzer | |
| Eats, Shoots and Leaves | Lynne Truss | More language mavens. That's what we all need. |
| Schott's Original Miscellany | Ben Schott | |
| The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | Edward Gibbon | |
| A History of the English-Speaking Peoples | Winston Churchill | |
| A History of the Crusades | Steven Runciman | True classic. |
| The Histories | Herodotus | |
| The History of the Peloponnesian War | Thucydides | Most of what we need to know about the modern nexus of politics and war, Thucydides said already. |
| Seven Pillars of Wisdom | T. E. Lawrence | |
| The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle | ||
| A People's Tragedy | Orlando Figes | |
| Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution | Simon Schama | |
| The Origins of the Second World War | A.J.P. Taylor | |
| Confessions | St Augustine | |
| Lives of the Caesars | Suetonius | |
| Lives of the Artists | Vasari | |
| If This is a Man | Primo Levi | |
| Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man | Siegfried Sassoon | |
| Eminent Victorians | Lytton Strachey | |
| A Life of Charlotte Brontë | Elizabeth Gaskell | |
| Goodbye to All That | Robert Graves | |
| The Life of Dr Johnson | Boswell | |
| Diaries | Alan Clark |
So there you have it, a warning never to scan my bookshelves. Too bad there aren't more entries for Japanese-English dictionaries. I'd have made out a bit better.
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2 comments:
Actually my library comes off a little better than I thought, though mainly because of the "trashy" stuff on the list I own like Harry Potter and Elmore Leonard and the number of books left on my shelf back in Canada from university coursework.
That said, its a pretty crap list if it includes JK Rowling and doesn't include Kurt Vonnegut or Mordicai Richler or Mark Twain. Obviously a British list, and I'm guessing it was put together by poll since it includes fluff like "A Year in Provence" but not "Huckleberry Finn" or Proust. At least there's no Barbara Cartland.
There's a couple of problems I have with it.
Where, I scream aloud and worry the dog, is Roberston Davies? Anything by Davies?
Ondaatje? The English Patient is one of the finest novels in a hyperbole laced time frame.
Not to mention Kazuo Ishiguro getting stiffed.
Not to mention John Keegan's treatise The Face of Battle.
I get kinda grumpy with these lists that are supposed to make you feel half-literate and omit some obvious stuff.
Plus dumping most of my university text books in the last three moves hasn't helped my score at all.
On the plus side, with the no Cartland came no Atwood.
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