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Reading Habits
15 years ago
"I will not die until I achieve something. Even though the ideal is high, I never give in. Therefore, I never die with regrets."
Borrowed from 
silentstranger
The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Copy this into your Journal. Look at the list and mark those you have read. Tag other book nerds.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - N
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - N (Actually for some reason I could never get into Tolkien, the grandeur intimidates me too much)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Y (Read it all in high school, actually really liked it)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Y (Up to the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - N (Saw the movie, not read the book yet even though I really should)
6 The Bible - N (Not entirely but certainly at least 1/4 of it. Read from Genesis to Exodus, and then all the Gospels as well as Revelations. Also actually have a small book entirely of the New Testament only for some bizarre reason)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - N
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Y (Brilliant, but so depressing I stopped reading it for 2 months)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - Y (I LOVED this series immensely)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - N
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - N
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - N
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - Y (Glad I got a chance to do so of my own will)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Y (I've read Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Twelfth Night)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - N
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - N
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - N
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - N
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - N
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - N
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel - N
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - N
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - N
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - N
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Y (Always remember where your towel is)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - N (I really should read some more Dostoevsky)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - N
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Y (Classic, and to think it's an outcry against a new wave of mathematics)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Y (A very soothing story)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - N
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - N
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Y (Read the first three)
34 Emma - Jane Austen - N
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - N
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Y (See Chronicles of Narnia)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - N
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - N (I really should read this considering my Greek heritage)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - N
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Y
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Y
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - N (Read the first several chapters and just...egh)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - N
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - N
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - N
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - N
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - N
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - N
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - N
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - N
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - N (I struggled to read this, I was just so damn bored by this)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - N
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - N
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - N
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - N
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - N
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - N
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - N
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - Y (One of my favourite books ever, for reasons that people who've read it will know why when I say I sympathise greatly with the main character)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - N
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Y (Read in school, really liked it)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - N
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - N
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - N
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - N
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - N
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - N
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - N
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - N (read some of but never got around to finishing sadly)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - N
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - N
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - N
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - N
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - N
76 The Inferno – Dante - Y (All the way down to Cocytus, hell I was recognising the circles when they appeared in the game based on it before they told you the circle)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - N
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - N
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - N
80 Possession - AS Byatt - N
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Y (Surprisingly yes, this is the only Dickens novel I've read...I feel bad)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - N
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - N (Wait this was a book originally? Damn)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - N
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - N
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - N
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - N
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - N
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Y (Totally)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - N (I do have them though!)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - N
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - N
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - N
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - Y (Longer book than you'd expect but brilliant)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - N (I hear this is an epically hilarious book but I never found it anywhere)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - N
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - N
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Y (As mentioned before, yes I have)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Y (Love this and the original 70s movie)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - N
Wow, 21 out of 100? Surprising, I feel pretty good about myself there, especially when I stopped being a serious reader after I left high school. Though I dunno about Gabriel Garcia Marquez being in there and all, is he really that good? I mean what about Don Quixote if you really wanna pick something from the Spanish language, and yanno, something ACTUALLY FROM SPAIN.
Egh oh well....I actually know most of these books by name but I do feel pretty bad that being on the internet all through the night has essentially robbed me of any time to be in bed with a novel. I used to love curling up with a good book and narrating it to myself to help me get into the book more, playing every single character that popped up (even the women), and....I dunno feeling really enlightened.
Most of the book-reading I did was during high school as an excuse to do something because I was incredibly bored with studying and literature was a pretty damn good escape for me from there, especially when I became a senior and got access to the Classics section.
I really miss my high school's library, it was small but it had everything in there, everything that was important you could want to read, especially the Classics section on the upper floor for seniors only.
Dante, Shakespeare, even a little bit of the Qu'Ran out of curiosity but I couldn't quote anything to you sadly. Yeah my high school had a Classics section with the Bible AND the Qu'Ran, isn't that AWESOME! And yes, they STILL kept that copy there in Classics during 9/11, in case we wanted to LEARN. Cuz...yanno someone might be doing an essay on Islam and need it for research, I mean we did have a religion class and all, that's how I pretty much read up on the Bible.
Even tried to read a bit of Chaucer but goddamn I was not expecting such a difference in how they spoke that far back, jesus. I could not read it, I'm sure it's good but I couldn't understand the guy....shame he never finished his Tales.
Kind of surprised at all the stuff I read back then for my age. I Robot, Inferno, 1984, Watership Down, Catch 22, Jane Eyre, even got to read The Diary of Anne Frank to move away from fiction for a while and get a grounding of reality.
So basically, what I'm trying to say is
FUCK YOU ANGUS COLLEGE ARBROATH AND I HOPE YOUR LIBRARY BURNS IN AN ELECTRICAL FIRE
IT'S NOT A LIBRARY, IT'S A FUCKING COMPUTER LAB WITH BOOKS IN IT LIKE SOME KIND OF BEATNIK COFFEE SPOT
Then again what do you expect from a college in Arbroath that isn't going to teach local history or how to fucking fish?
Okay okay seriously just saying I should read up more on stuff and that my high school library was the best goddamn school library in the county, so yeah I hate that college so much.
silentstrangerThe BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?
Instructions: Copy this into your Journal. Look at the list and mark those you have read. Tag other book nerds.
1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen - N
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien - N (Actually for some reason I could never get into Tolkien, the grandeur intimidates me too much)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte - Y (Read it all in high school, actually really liked it)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - Y (Up to the fifth book, Order of the Phoenix)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee - N (Saw the movie, not read the book yet even though I really should)
6 The Bible - N (Not entirely but certainly at least 1/4 of it. Read from Genesis to Exodus, and then all the Gospels as well as Revelations. Also actually have a small book entirely of the New Testament only for some bizarre reason)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte - N
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell - Y (Brilliant, but so depressing I stopped reading it for 2 months)
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman - Y (I LOVED this series immensely)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens - N
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott - N
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy - N
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller - Y (Glad I got a chance to do so of my own will)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - Y (I've read Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth and Twelfth Night)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier - N
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien - N
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk - N
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger - N
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger - N
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot - N
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchel - N
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald - N
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens - N
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy - N
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams - Y (Always remember where your towel is)
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky - N (I really should read some more Dostoevsky)
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck - N
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll - Y (Classic, and to think it's an outcry against a new wave of mathematics)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame - Y (A very soothing story)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy - N
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens - N
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis - Y (Read the first three)
34 Emma - Jane Austen - N
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen - N
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis - Y (See Chronicles of Narnia)
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini - N
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres - N (I really should read this considering my Greek heritage)
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden - N
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne - Y
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell - Y
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown - N (Read the first several chapters and just...egh)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - N
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving - N
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins - N
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery - N
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy - N
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood - N
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding - N
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan - N
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel - N (I struggled to read this, I was just so damn bored by this)
52 Dune - Frank Herbert - N
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons - N
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen - N
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth - N
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon - N
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens - N
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley - N
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon - Y (One of my favourite books ever, for reasons that people who've read it will know why when I say I sympathise greatly with the main character)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez - N
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck - Y (Read in school, really liked it)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov - N
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt - N
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold - N
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas - N
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac - N
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy - N
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding - N
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie - N (read some of but never got around to finishing sadly)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville - N
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens - N
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker - N
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - N
75 Ulysses - James Joyce - N
76 The Inferno – Dante - Y (All the way down to Cocytus, hell I was recognising the circles when they appeared in the game based on it before they told you the circle)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome - N
78 Germinal - Emile Zola - N
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray - N
80 Possession - AS Byatt - N
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens - Y (Surprisingly yes, this is the only Dickens novel I've read...I feel bad)
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell - N
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker - N (Wait this was a book originally? Damn)
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro - N
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert - N
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry - N
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White - N
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom - N
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - Y (Totally)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton - N (I do have them though!)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad - N
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery - N
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks - N
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams - Y (Longer book than you'd expect but brilliant)
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole - N (I hear this is an epically hilarious book but I never found it anywhere)
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute - N
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas - N
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare - Y (As mentioned before, yes I have)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl - Y (Love this and the original 70s movie)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo - N
Wow, 21 out of 100? Surprising, I feel pretty good about myself there, especially when I stopped being a serious reader after I left high school. Though I dunno about Gabriel Garcia Marquez being in there and all, is he really that good? I mean what about Don Quixote if you really wanna pick something from the Spanish language, and yanno, something ACTUALLY FROM SPAIN.
Egh oh well....I actually know most of these books by name but I do feel pretty bad that being on the internet all through the night has essentially robbed me of any time to be in bed with a novel. I used to love curling up with a good book and narrating it to myself to help me get into the book more, playing every single character that popped up (even the women), and....I dunno feeling really enlightened.
Most of the book-reading I did was during high school as an excuse to do something because I was incredibly bored with studying and literature was a pretty damn good escape for me from there, especially when I became a senior and got access to the Classics section.
I really miss my high school's library, it was small but it had everything in there, everything that was important you could want to read, especially the Classics section on the upper floor for seniors only.
Dante, Shakespeare, even a little bit of the Qu'Ran out of curiosity but I couldn't quote anything to you sadly. Yeah my high school had a Classics section with the Bible AND the Qu'Ran, isn't that AWESOME! And yes, they STILL kept that copy there in Classics during 9/11, in case we wanted to LEARN. Cuz...yanno someone might be doing an essay on Islam and need it for research, I mean we did have a religion class and all, that's how I pretty much read up on the Bible.
Even tried to read a bit of Chaucer but goddamn I was not expecting such a difference in how they spoke that far back, jesus. I could not read it, I'm sure it's good but I couldn't understand the guy....shame he never finished his Tales.
Kind of surprised at all the stuff I read back then for my age. I Robot, Inferno, 1984, Watership Down, Catch 22, Jane Eyre, even got to read The Diary of Anne Frank to move away from fiction for a while and get a grounding of reality.
So basically, what I'm trying to say is
FUCK YOU ANGUS COLLEGE ARBROATH AND I HOPE YOUR LIBRARY BURNS IN AN ELECTRICAL FIRE
IT'S NOT A LIBRARY, IT'S A FUCKING COMPUTER LAB WITH BOOKS IN IT LIKE SOME KIND OF BEATNIK COFFEE SPOT
Then again what do you expect from a college in Arbroath that isn't going to teach local history or how to fucking fish?
Okay okay seriously just saying I should read up more on stuff and that my high school library was the best goddamn school library in the county, so yeah I hate that college so much.
Oh yeah, and some far-out comics and graphic novels, though hardly any industry serieses, except for the Italian Duck comics, and hardly any superhero stuff (except for Frank Miller's The Dark Knight returns). Favorite comics on my reading list include Don Rosa, Cerebus (haven't read much of it yet, but I like the character, drawing style, and basic idea), Howard the Duck (mostly b/w magazine only, plus Heroes Reborn, AND DON'T FRICKIN' TALK TO ME ABOUT THAT MOVIE!), Schuiten's Le Cites obscure, Jim Woodring's Frank, Crumb's Kafka, Bill Grifith's Zippy the Pinhead, Scott McCloud's Understanding comics (it's not just about comics, I consider it basic reading material for anybody working in visual and/or narrative arts)...
This ends the daily joke at the reader's expense. The management promises to be more responsible in future comments. *snigger*
Seriously, though... I get up to 19 on there, which does at least make me feel gratifyingly superior to the BBC's 'most people', albeit slightly inferior to the current high score of 21, as mentioned.
I've read an awful lot more than that, of course, albeit a number of years ago in most cases. Real life gives me less time for a good novel than I'd like, most of the time.