8.11.2010

Books books and more books

Just found this one someone else's blog and decided I would post it on mine too. Apparently BBC put together this list and the premise was that a group of readers were trying to determine the best novel ever. And an average person has read about 30 of them. Putting "x's" next to the one's I've read. Going to try and work my way through some of the others as time goes on.

[X] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien Couldn't get through the Council of Elrond chapter where they forge the fellowship.
[] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[X] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[X] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[X] 6 The Bible - does it have to be the entire thing? If so, i'm working on it.
[X] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - loved it but got a little sad at the end because of how depressing and messed up everyone is.
[] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
[X] 11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
[] 12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
[] 13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
[] 14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
[] 15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
[X] 16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
[] 17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
[X] 18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
[] 19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
[] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[] 23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
[] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[X] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[] 26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
[] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
[] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[X] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[X] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (is there a difference between this one and #33?)
[] 37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
[] 38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
[X] 39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
[X] 40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
[] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[X] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
[] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[X] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[X] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
[] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[X] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens LOVED IT BTW
[] 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
[] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[X] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tart
[X] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[X] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
[] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[] 76 The Inferno - Dante
[] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[] 80 Possession - AS Byatt
[] 81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
[] 82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
[] 83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
[] 84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
[] 85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
[] 86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
[X] 87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
[X] 88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
[] 89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
[] 90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
[] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[] 92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
[] 93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
[] 94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
[] 95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
[] 96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
[] 97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
[] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[] 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I'm at 22. only 78 more to go. Next on the list for me to read is Bleak House and Sense and Sensibility. not sure why some books didn't make this list, but it is a good place to start reading some great novels.

5 comments:

  1. It IS a good list! Kind of surprised Frankenstein by Shelley isn't on there, but you can't include them all.

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  2. I love you! I am working through the list and was wondering if someone read it to me, does that count?

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  3. hi katherine. found you from doing a search on word snippets from a song we sang at church last sunday. they have been rolling around in my head for days, this morning in particular, and when i looked up 'heaven holds me' - tada! your blog on all the lyrics to "sing my love" came up! i was delighted to find those lyrics bc The Lord was really hitting home to me the way He sees us and the way i look at people. and how much i need to see them through His eyes. i also wanted to let you know that you have convinced me to give p.f.chang's a try. my husband loves chinese food and will be pleasantly shocked if i suggest we go there. no, really. he might question if i am his wife or not.

    so, in the interest of not being a lurker, i have a question for you about some of those books on the bbc reading list. i don't know quite how to put this into definitive words exactly, but i really wonder about giving some of the content from material directly opposed to The Lord and His ways, a place in my life. it seems that the majority of reading lists now include content that blatantly promotes ideas that are contrary to The Kingdom of God. in my opinion, it is at the very least, planting seeds in our thought processes that teach us how to oppose God, or help to crowd Him out. Jesus was really clear about what we let in our eye gate and how it affects us. in fact, it's a topic that i am currently blogging about myself (www.protectedbride.com) because i am concerned at the level of acceptance The Body of Christ seems to exhibit for things that promote the lust of the eyes, the lust of the flesh and the pride of life. i am curious about your thoughts on that.

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  4. Hey Kim - Thanks for stopping by my blog! Seems a lot of people find my blog looking for the lyrics to that Sarah McMillan song. It's a good one, eh? She has several other songs that always grip my heart during worship as well.

    Regarding your question on the BBC reading list. You are right. There are a lot of books on there that weren't written from a Kingdom Perspective and could be viewed as a hindrance or something that might cause a christian to stumble while reading them. But, there are two sides to every coin and a lot of those books are amazingly creative and one of the ways I expand and push my writing to the next level is by reading. and reading outside of the box.

    I also feel strongly that believers, filled with the spirit are given the gift of discernment as needed. not everyone will come along the same stumbling block and stumble.

    For instance, someone could read the Harry Potter books could become so fascinated by the world of magic portrayed in these books that they are then sucked down into dark magic and witchcraft. BUT someone else could read those books and find them highly entertaining and even draw parallels from the kingdom throughout the books while reading them. (i.e. muggle world vs. wizard world could be similar to life on earth and the spiritual realm...there's a whole other battle going on we can't see, but it still affects us here on earth yadda, yadda, yadda) all the while still realizing that the real world of magic is a dark scary place to not let our minds and hearts take hold of those ideas.

    All that to say, I think that everyone has different threshold for what will cause them to sin and each person needs to determine where their boundary lies. I also think that remaining a pure and a perfect bride for Jesus is important. I also think that the only way that can happen is through His grace and through our pursuit of His heart.

    Cheers,
    Kat

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  5. thanks for the response. it’s a good discussion kat and it’s truly a topic that has been on my heart for awhile. i personally err more on the cautionary side, for sure. and my level of sensitivity is not at all a standard to uphold people by. everyone must decide about certain things as they feel in their heart, just as in romans 14 when paul talks about each one making up his own mind according to what his conscience allows him to do, not passing judgment on another, and each being fully convinced in his own mind. paul uses foods as an example, and that which was sacrificed to idols, and some people apparently had issues with that. i suppose i regard a lot of our culture’s work, super creative or not, as food sacrificed to idols, so to speak. again, that’s just me. verse 14 talks about if one regards something as unclean, than for him, it IS unclean and verse 23, "but the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin."

    as far as discernment goes, i wonder about the effect a lot of this material has towards the dulling of our spirit that would get us to the point where we really aren’t practicing it. you know the example about the frog in the pot? the heats gets turned up little by little until eventually, unaware of just how dire the situation is, it gets boiled alive.

    at any rate, we definitely need His grace and Spirit to lead us and I am not pure without the washing of His blood. back to the lyrics of the sarah mcmillan song about Father God seeing me through His Son – seeing me as holy. and the fact that He calls me to be holy - not holier than thou - but holy, just as He is, set apart for The Master’s use.

    blessings to you and have a nice weekend!

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