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How many of these classics have you read? (Calling all bookworms!) (pg. 5)
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| DJ Mach X |
If we're being honest... and we're going with books I ACTUALLY read... ie. cover to cover with comprehension of the story.
I scored 8...
Now if we count books I skimmed, skipped through, wrote a paper/book report on, did a presentation on, referenced for some other school project....
I probably got between 15-18...
Good post though, falls right into my new years resolutions and reading more, I used to read all the time back as a kid when my parents were barely making ends meet but always had money for me to get books, any book I wanted as long as it wasn't comics or something stupid! No video games, computer, satellite TV or the internet... wow!? :eyes: :conf:
Brings up another topic tho.... with the integration of the internet in our daily lives. Are we reading less? Or more? Just because it's not in a "book" or a deemed a "classic" is it considered not reading?
I kick myself all the time for not reading like I used to, staying up all night doing 'just one more chapter, it's a short one'... but I read every day, blogs, online newspapers... HELL half the you guys write on here is literary genius!
Does reading constitute an actual book?
Is someone who read Fahrenheit 451 (Dunno why that wasn't on the list considering the other contenders) any better than someone who read the entire Twilight series? Or all three Robert Ludlum Bourne books? Just because someone CLAIMS it's an important novel, ONE novel... 500 pages of what society thinks is something you should read better than a few thousand pages of something else? |
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| DigiNut |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Mach X
Now if we count books I skimmed, skipped through, wrote a paper/book report on, did a presentation on, referenced for some other school project.... |
I think those really ought to be counted as negatives, if you couldn't even get through the whole book. |
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| DJ Mach X |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
I think those really ought to be counted as negatives, if you couldn't even get through the whole book. |
Meh, I regret it now, but my priorities and time managment probably wasn't up to par when I was in high school.... |
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| evil_cookie |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Mach X
Is someone who read Fahrenheit 451 (Dunno why that wasn't on the list considering the other contenders) any better than someone who read the entire Twilight series? Or all three Robert Ludlum Bourne books? Just because someone CLAIMS it's an important novel, ONE novel... 500 pages of what society thinks is something you should read better than a few thousand pages of something else? |
Short answer, yes.
Except replace Bradbury with someone like Beckett, Nabokov, or Plath--all of whom have produced far more valuable works than Stephenie Meyer. |
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| Ania_xox |
I am turned on by how many guys read Jane Austen
:disbelief |
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| Abercrombie |
| quote: | Originally posted by Ania_xox
I am turned on by how many guys read Jane Austen
:disbelief |
.... and French novels? |
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| Spam |
| quote: | Originally posted by DJ Mach X
If we're being honest... and we're going with books I ACTUALLY read... ie. cover to cover with comprehension of the story.
I scored 8...
Now if we count books I skimmed, skipped through, wrote a paper/book report on, did a presentation on, referenced for some other school project....
I probably got between 15-18...
Good post though, falls right into my new years resolutions and reading more, I used to read all the time back as a kid when my parents were barely making ends meet but always had money for me to get books, any book I wanted as long as it wasn't comics or something stupid! No video games, computer, satellite TV or the internet... wow!? :eyes: :conf:
Brings up another topic tho.... with the integration of the internet in our daily lives. Are we reading less? Or more? Just because it's not in a "book" or a deemed a "classic" is it considered not reading?
I kick myself all the time for not reading like I used to, staying up all night doing 'just one more chapter, it's a short one'... but I read every day, blogs, online newspapers... HELL half the you guys write on here is literary genius!
Does reading constitute an actual book?
Is someone who read Fahrenheit 451 (Dunno why that wasn't on the list considering the other contenders) any better than someone who read the entire Twilight series? Or all three Robert Ludlum Bourne books? Just because someone CLAIMS it's an important novel, ONE novel... 500 pages of what society thinks is something you should read better than a few thousand pages of something else? |
A lot of those classics really do suck. Take Lord of the Rings, for instance. The books are a snooze-fest, but somehow it's considered a "classic" (I believe because LotR is what made elves, goblins and all that ilk into the cliches they are today, but back then it was fresh material?). Brave New World isn't that great either, but it's a classic simply because it's a dystopian view of our future society that they can use as a comparative with 1984 (one of my favourite books).
I read a lot of books using the internet. Like I mentioned, I looked up "The Little Prince" on google, and had it read in about 50 minutes. Downloadable books = win in my eyes! |
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| Spam |
| quote: | Originally posted by DigiNut
I think those really ought to be counted as negatives, if you couldn't even get through the whole book. |
I don't consider skimming to be a negative in some cases.. There are lots of books that waste paper-space on telling me that the flowers were yellow and the dust was billowing around the traveler's feet. I could really care less about that stuff, and I can skim through those types of paragraphs in no time, and STILL know what the author was trying to convey. If you can skim through a book and still know the story in-depth and be capable of talking about all the themes and the plot, I say who cares that you didn't know the flower was yellow on page 253?
That said, if you're just skipping everything but the dialogue, then claiming you've read the book, slap a negative on that biatch lol. |
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| deephousekid |
| To Kill a Mockingbird /Cather in the rye good books----- that list is just too damn long |
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| newkicks |
*eek @ Harry Potter listed as a classic... but otherwise, nice list.
[x] 1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
[ ] 2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
[x] 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
[x] 4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
[x] 5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
[ ] 6 The Bible - priests
[x] 7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
[x] 8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
[ ] 9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
[x] 10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Total: 7
[x] 11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
[x] 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 Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
[x] 20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
Total: 5
[ ] 21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
[ ] 22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
[ ] 24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
[x] 25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
[ ] 27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
[x] 28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
[x] 29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
[ ] 30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
Total: 3
[x] 31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
[ ] 32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
[x] 33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
[x] 34 Emma - Jane Austen
[x] 35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
[x] 36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
[ ] 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
Total: 7
[x] 41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
[x] 42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
[x] 43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
[ ] 44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
[ ] 45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
[ ] 46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
[ ] 47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
[x] 48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
[ ] 49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
[ ] 50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
Total: 4
[x] 51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
[ ] 52 Dune - Frank Herbert
[ ] 53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
[x] 54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
[ ] 55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
[ ] 56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
[ ] 57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
[x] 58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
[ ] 59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon
[x] 60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Total: 4
[ ] 61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
[x] 62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
[ ] 63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
[x] 64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
[ ] 65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
[x] 66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
[ ] 67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
[ ] 68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
[ ] 69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
[x] 70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Total: 4
[x] 71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
[ ] 72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
[x] 73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
[ ] 74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
[x] 75 Ulysses - James Joyce
[ ] 76 The Inferno - Dante
[x] 77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
[ ] 78 Germinal - Emile Zola
[x] 79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
[ ] 80 Possession - AS Byatt
Total: 5
[ ] 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
[ ] 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
Total: 1
[ ] 91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
[x] 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
[x] 98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
[x] 99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
[ ] 100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Total: 3
Grand Total: 43
sadly, most of these were not by choice. |
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| v-vaughn |
| quote: | Originally posted by Spam
A lot of those classics really do suck. Take Lord of the Rings, for instance. The books are a snooze-fest, but somehow it's considered a "classic" (I believe because LotR is what made elves, goblins and all that ilk into the cliches they are today, but back then it was fresh material?). |
Yeah, I agree. I think what you're saying is pretty much exactly why LOTR is a classic. Tolkien gets all that credit not really because of his writing style (which I find at times to be almost overly descriptive and doesn't seem to capture the reader anywhere near as much as other authors can) but because of his imagination and originality at the time. I mean, the guy created an Elven language and his own world. That's pretty hardcore considering there wasn't really anything else like that out there. There's a lot of fantasy out there now, but years ago it would definitely be considered something really unique. |
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