And so I come to my 100th post. I was going to make this a bit of a discussion on new music delivery models (namely Spotify) and my thoughts on them, but I've decided that can be post no 101 or even a bit futher on.
No, today we are talking lists, specifically, the kinds of list that tell you you should have read/listened to/done, or whatever, the various things contained therein. Of course, these things are largely pointless because they generally involve lists made up by journos or pundits all of whom, have some sort of agenda and so they are far too abitrary, but I have done one or two of late and thought I'd share them with you.
So, first up, a list of 100 books that apparently everyone should read according so some spurious BBC News article.
1 - Read some plays and sonnets at school but by no means the whole lot. I doubt many people have truly done so or have the patience to put up with the overly-wordy prose.
2 - I started to read it but gave up because, frankly, it was shit.
So, thats the books taken care of. Next was a list on The Guardian website regarding 1000 (yes, one thousand!) songs you should hear before you die, or somesuch. And since it's my blog, I am going to list every last one of the buggers in the next post.
No, today we are talking lists, specifically, the kinds of list that tell you you should have read/listened to/done, or whatever, the various things contained therein. Of course, these things are largely pointless because they generally involve lists made up by journos or pundits all of whom, have some sort of agenda and so they are far too abitrary, but I have done one or two of late and thought I'd share them with you.
So, first up, a list of 100 books that apparently everyone should read according so some spurious BBC News article.
| Title | Author | Have I? |
| Pride and Prejudice | Jane Austen | No |
| The Lord of the Rings | JRR Tolkien | Yes |
| Jane Eyre | Charlotte Bronte | No |
| Harry Potter series | JK Rowling | No |
| To Kill a Mockingbird | Harper Lee | No |
| The Bible | No | |
| Wuthering Heights | Emily Bronte | No |
| Nineteen Eighty Four | George Orwell | Yes |
| His Dark Materials | Philip Pullman | No |
| Great Expectations | Charles Dickens | No |
| Little Women | Louisa M Alcott | No |
| Tess of the D’Urbervilles | Thomas Hardy | No |
| Catch 22 | Joseph Heller | Intend |
| Complete Works | William Shakespeare | Partial1 |
| Rebecca | Daphne Du Maurier | No |
| The Hobbit | JRR Tolkien | Yes |
| Birdsong | Sebastian Faulks | No |
| Catcher in the Rye | JD Salinger | Intend |
| The Time Traveller’s Wife | Audrey Niffenegger | No |
| Middlemarch | George Eliott | No |
| Gone With The Wind | Margaret Mitchell | No |
| The Great Gatsby | F Scott Fitzgerald | No |
| Bleak House | Charles Dickens | No |
| War and Peace | Leo Tolstoy | No |
| The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy | Douglas Adams | No |
| Brideshead Revisited | Evelyn Waugh | No |
| Crime and Punishment | Fyodor Dostoyevsky | No |
| Grapes of Wrath | John Steinbeck | Intend |
| Alice in Wonderland | Lewis Carroll | Yes |
| The Wind in the Willows | Kenneth Grahame | Yes |
| Anna Karenina | Leo Tolstoy | No |
| David Copperfield | Charles Dickens | No |
| Chronicles of Narnia | CS Lewis | No |
| Emma | Jane Austen | No |
| Persuasion | Jane Austen | No |
| The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe | CS Lewis | Yes |
| The Kite Runner | Khaled Hosseini | No |
| Captain Corelli’s Mandolin | Louis De Bernieres | No |
| Memoirs of a Geisha | Arthur Golden | No |
| Winnie the Pooh | AA Milne | Yes |
| Animal Farm | George Orwell | Intend |
| The Da Vinci Code | Dan Brown | No |
| One Hundred Years of Solitude | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | No |
| A Prayer for Owen Meaney | John Irving | No |
| The Woman in White | Wilkie Collins | No |
| Anne of Green Gables | LM Montgomery | No |
| Far From The Madding Crowd | Thomas Hardy | No |
| The Handmaid’s Tale | Margaret Atwood | Intend |
| Lord of the Flies | William Golding | Yes |
| Atonement | Ian McEwan | No |
| Life of Pi | Yann Martel | Partial2 |
| Dune | Frank Herbert | Yes |
| Cold Comfort Farm | Stella Gibbons | No |
| Sense and Sensibility | Jane Austen | No |
| A Suitable Boy | Vikram Seth | No |
| The Shadow of the Wind | Carlos Ruiz Zafon | No |
| A Tale Of Two Cities | Charles Dickens | No |
| Brave New World | Aldous Huxley | Intend |
| The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time | Mark Haddon | No |
| Love In The Time Of Cholera | Gabriel Garcia Marquez | No |
| Of Mice and Men | John Steinbeck | Yes |
| Lolita | Vladimir Nabokov | No |
| The Secret History | Donna Tartt | No |
| The Lovely Bones | Alice Sebold | No |
| Count of Monte Cristo | Alexandre Dumas | No |
| On The Road | Jack Kerouac | No |
| Jude the Obscure | Thomas Hardy | No |
| Bridget Jones’s Diary | Helen Fielding | No |
| Midnight’s Children | Salman Rushdie | No |
| Moby Dick | Herman Melville | No |
| Oliver Twist | Charles Dickens | No |
| Dracula | Bram Stoker | No |
| The Secret Garden | Frances Hodgson Burnett | No |
| Notes From A Small Island | Bill Bryson | Yes |
| Ulysses | James Joyce | Intend |
| The Bell Jar | Sylvia Plath | No |
| Swallows and Amazons | Arthur Ransome | Yes |
| Germinal | Emile Zola | No |
| Vanity Fair | William Makepeace Thackeray | No |
| Possession | AS Byatt | No |
| A Christmas Carol | Charles Dickens | No |
| Cloud Atlas | David Mitchell | No |
| The Color Purple | Alice Walker | No |
| The Remains of the Day | Kazuo Ishiguro | No |
| Madame Bovary | Gustave Flaubert | No |
| A Fine Balance | Rohinton Mistry | No |
| Charlotte’s Web | EB White | No |
| The Five People You Meet In Heaven | Mitch Albom | No |
| Adventures of Sherlock Holmes | Sir Arthur Conan Doyle | No |
| The Faraway Tree Collection | Enid Blyton | No |
| Heart of Darkness | Joseph Conrad | No |
| The Little Prince | Antoine De Saint-Exupery | No |
| The Wasp Factory | Iain Banks | Intend |
| Watership Down | Richard Adams | No |
| A Confederacy of Dunces | John Kennedy Toole | No |
| A Town Like Alice | Nevil Shute | Intend |
| The Three Musketeers | Alexandre Dumas | No |
| Hamlet | William Shakespeare | Yes |
| Charlie and the Chocolate Factory | Roald Dahl | Yes |
| Les Miserables | Victor Hugo | No |
1 - Read some plays and sonnets at school but by no means the whole lot. I doubt many people have truly done so or have the patience to put up with the overly-wordy prose.
2 - I started to read it but gave up because, frankly, it was shit.
So, thats the books taken care of. Next was a list on The Guardian website regarding 1000 (yes, one thousand!) songs you should hear before you die, or somesuch. And since it's my blog, I am going to list every last one of the buggers in the next post.