1) What author do you own the most books by?
Stephen King

2) What book do you own the most copies of?
I don’t do concurrent copies, but I have read The Stand to rags and re-purchased it

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions?
meh

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with?
Frodo ::swoon:: And maybe Sam Vimes

5) What book have you read the most times in your life?
The Stand. I reread it once every couple of years. IT is probably a close second.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old?
I’ve no idea

7) What is the worst book you’ve read in the past year?
I don’t think I’ve read any bad books, but I’ve gotten some that I just couldn’t get into at the time…Guns, Germs, and Steel and The Extraordinary Madness of Crowds for example

What is the best book you’ve read in the past year?
Letter to a Christian Nation

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be?
I’m not tagging anybody, but I’d make everyone read Letter to a Christian Nation and maybe The Age of American Unreason and The Shock Doctrine

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for literature?
Someone who can write, obviously…Just give them all to Toni Morrison and save time

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie?
I would love to see someone with sense make a Discworld movie. WITH SENSE.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie?
Any of Stephen King’s books that haven’t been movie-fied yet. They just ruin them. Lay off!

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character.
I don’t recall ever having dreamed about any of those things, except maybe IT, and that was more pants-wetting scary than weird…

14) What is the most lowbrow book you’ve read as an adult?
Depends on your definition…If you think Stephen King is lowbrow, then most of those

15) What is the most difficult book you’ve ever read?
Several works of Japanese and Chinese literature fit into this category. Gerald’s Game definitely fits.

16) Do you prefer the French or the Russians?
Bleak and depressing Russians FTW.

18) Roth or Updike?
Never read ‘em

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers?
Sedaris seems more trendy, so I’ll go for Eggers

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer?
Chaucer/Shakespeare

21) J. Austen or G. Eliot?
MEH

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading?
I have read embarrassingly little “classic” “literature.” Stuff like War and Peace, Middlemarch, and so on. (It’s the authors’ fault for including few or no dragons in their books!)

23) What is your favorite novel?
LOTR, of course

24) Play?
I don’t really do plays…

27) Short story?
“The End of the Whole Mess” by (yes, again) Stephen King

28) Work of nonfiction?
The Shock Doctrine and Letter to a Christian Nation, at present

29) Who is your favorite writer?
Right now? Chuck Palahniuk.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today?
Ugh, Stephanie Meyer and those dudes who wrote Left Behind. And J. K. Rowling.

31) What is your desert island book?
Someone once asked G.K. Chesterton what book he’d most like to have on a desert island. He answered, “Thomas’s Guide to Practical Shipbuilding.”

32) What are you reading right now?
Sourcery by Terry Pratchett

34) If you knew you would have the chance to read (n.b.: not REread) just one more book/play before you die, what would it be, and why is that?
LOTR – I wouldn’t mind my final moments to be spent traveling to the West

Tags: meme

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

Here’s my response:

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X+
6 The Bible X (yes, all of it, beginning at Genesis 1 and ending at the end of Revelation…Cherry-picking doesn’t count!)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte *
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X+
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare + (Not all, but most)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
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 X+
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens *
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X+
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X+ (Not all, but this is silly…)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X+ (… because this is one of the “Chronicles of Narnia”)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden X
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X+
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 Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery X
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens *
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 *
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas X+
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac X
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 X
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X+
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X+
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce *
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath X+
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 X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X+
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X
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 X
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 X+
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo X

Total: 44 read, 19 to read

Tags: meme