Oh, what the hell.

[pantryslut]

I've got two hours to my plane. I'm packed. it's the middle of the night.



The ones I've read are in bold as usual.

·1984 George Orwell
·The Alchemist Paulo Coelho
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland Lewis Carroll
·Animal Farm George Orwell
·Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
·Anne of Green Gables LM Montgomery
·Artemis Fowl Eoin Colfer
·The BFG Roald Dahl
·Birdsong Sebastian Faulks
·Black Beauty Anna Sewell
·Bleak House Charles Dickens
·Brave New World Aldous Huxley
·Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
·Bridget Jones' Diary Helen Fielding

(not strong on the B's, are we!)

·Captain Corelli's Mandolin Louis de Bernières
Catch-22 Joseph Heller
The Catcher in the Rye JD Salinger
·Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl
A Christmas Carol Charles Dickens
The Clan of the Cave Bear Jean M Auel
·Cold Comfort Farm Stella Gibbons
·The Colour of Magic Terry Pratchett
·The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas (but I want to)
·Crime and Punishment Fyodor Dostoyevsky (but other Dostoevsky)
·David Copperfield Charles Dickens
·Double Act Jacqueline Wilson
Dune Frank Herbert
·Emma Jane Austen
·Far From the Madding Crowd Thomas Hardy
·Girls in Love Jacqueline Wilson
·The God of Small Things Arundhati Roy
·The Godfather Mario Puzo
·Gone with the Wind Margaret Mitchell
Good Omens Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
·Goodnight Mr Tom Michelle Magorian
·Gormenghast Mervyn Peake
·The Grapes of Wrath John Steinbeck
·Great Expectations Charles Dickens (apparently I prefer *unpopular* Dickens)
·The Great Gatsby F Scott Fitzgerald
·Guards! Guards! Terry Pratchett
·Harry Potter & the Chamber of Secrets JK Rowling
·Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire JK Rowling
·Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone JK Rowling
·Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban JK Rowling
His Dark Materials trilogy Philip Pullman
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
The Hobbit JRR Tolkien
·Holes Louis Sacher
·I Capture the Castle Dodie Smith
·Jane Eyre Charlotte Brontë
·Kane and Abel Jeffrey Archer
·Katherine Anya Seton
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe CS Lewis
·Little Women Louisa May Alcott (didn't finish)
Lord of the Flies William Golding
The Lord of the Rings JRR Tolkien
·Love in the Time of Cholera Gabriel Garcia Marquez
·The Magic Faraway Tree Enid Blyton
Magician Raymond E Feist (ugh.)
·The Magus John Fowles
·Matilda Roald Dahl
·Memoirs of a Geisha Arthur Golden
·Middlemarch George Eliot
·Midnight's Children Salman Rushdie
·Mort Terry Pratchett
·Nightwatch Terry Pratchett
·Noughts and Crosses Malorie Blackman
Of Mice and Men John Steinbeck
·On the Road Jack Kerouac
·One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
·Perfume Patrick Süskind
·Persuasion Jane Austen
·The Pillars of the Earth Ken Follett
·A Prayer for Owen Meaney John Irving
Pride and Prejudice Jane Austen (and loathed it)
·The Princess Diaries Meg Cabot
·The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists Robert Tressell
·Rebecca Daphne du Maurier
·The Secret Garden Frances Hodgson Burnett
·The Secret History Donna Tartt
·The Shell Seekers Rosamund Pilcher
·The Stand Stephen King
·The Story of Tracy Beaker Jacqueline Wilson
·A Suitable Boy Vikram Seth
·Swallows and Amazons Arthur Ransome
A Tale of Two Cities Charles Dickens
Tess of the D'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy (apparently I read the wrong Hardy. too. Didn't finish this one. Loved Jude the Obscure at the time.)
·The Thorn Birds Colleen McCollough
To Kill a Mockingbird Harper Lee
·A Town Like Alice Nevil Shute
·Treasure Island Robert Louis Stevenson
·The Twits Roald Dahl
·Ulysses James Joyce
·Vicky Angel Jacqueline Wilson
·War and Peace Leo Tolstoy (I read two pages in Russian, but that doesn't count)
Watership Down Richard Adams
·The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
·Winnie the Pooh AA Milne
·The Woman in White Wilkie Collins
·Wuthering Heights Emily Brontë





Well, now I feel under-educated :) and to think, I was an English major, too. So I have no excuse.

Except that I dislike everything between Shakespeare and, er, Whitman.

I wonder what my 100 most beloved books would be. No time to construct a proper list. But a few come to mind.

I'm having a minor spat on r.a.sf.c about what I'm coming to call "mashed potato people" and their supposed opposites, the pointy folk who like difficult books. (It's not worth looking up.) I would be more a pointy person than a potato, according to this scheme. And yet, when I was thinking about a book that would be on my *personal* Best Beloved list, I got confused:



Turgenev, Fathers and Sons. Pointy or potato?
pro-potato: breezy, accessible prose. And compared to Dostoevsky...
pro-pointy: deep, philosophical issues of our time! Nihilism! Dark brooding antiheroes! Oh, and all those supposedly difficult Russian names.

Shakespeare. Pointy or potato?
pro-potato: cracking good stories! Love those one-liners! And aww, romance and true love win out in the end.
pro-pointy: all those deep, thoughtful soliloquies. And footnotes. And tragedies are always pointy, aren't they?

The Earthsea books by Ursula K. LeGuin. Well, everybody knows that the first three books are yummy nummy potatoey, and then she had to get all message-y and serious with the fourth book and that made her turn pointy and dull. (pointy *and* dull. Clever trick, that.)

Try this at home with your own favorites!

Well, of course the whole reason I got into this in the first place is because I felt it was a false binary. So if you see me chanting "pointy potato people!" sometime soon, you know why.

(More likely I'll be shouting "berries are flat!" and giggling uncontrollably, but I'll leave that story for another time.)