Done with Reading Fluff

I have decided to get back to reading some more challenging and more critically acclaimed books. No more Anita Blake. The first few in the series were engaging and the mysteries were compelling, but Hamilton has decided to focus on the smut aspect of her writing. I am all for a little sex and romance in my books, but if I end up skipping through all the erotic stuff to get to plot points, the books are no longer worth reading.

I am wondering how she keeps on getting published. I guess I should not be surprised since Fifty Shades of Grey was such a big seller. There is a market for it. I am just not excited by reading solely about sex. I need to be wooed and romanced. Having a story to go along with it will keep me interested and reading. Just describing various sexual acts is kind of boring. I used to love the Diana Gabaldon Outlander series.

So, I have gone back to the classics. I started reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. It's like CSI before there were fancy machines. I love the way Conan Doyle has written this character and the stories are fun to read. If you get a chance, check out the BBC series Sherlock, which is a modern take on the classic tales. There is also a modern Sherlock Holmes story written by Anthony Horowitz called The House of Silk.

I have downloaded quite a few free books from the Apple bookstore. I went online, and checked out the lists of the top 100 books. Also, BBC's the Big Read compiled the 200 most favourite books of their readers, and I went to the Harvard bookstore for their top 100 list. Through the various lists, I choose some books to download, like those written by Jane Austen, George Elliot, and Charles Dickens. The newer books, I will try to find at my local library.

I have already read quite a few of the top 100 books compiled by BBC. As many people before have commented, quite a few of the books are probably not the "greatest" books and many others we do not have the patience to read. I cannot for the life of me understand what is happening in One Hundred Years of Solitude. I might have to restart it, but I am not sure it will help. Where is The Good Earth by Pearl S. Buck? Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follet? I am sure I could find a different top 100 with a whole new set of books. The Harvard list has a lot more contempory books, High Fidelity by Nick Hornby, for example.

Here's the BBC list. I put an asterix next to the books I have read entirely. I have read 48 of them, and parts of a few others.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen *
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien *
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (saw the movie)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling *
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6 The Bible (I have read parts of it. Quite a lot for an atheist.)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell *
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (planning on reading this series)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (saw the movie)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy (we were supposed to read it in high school, but a girl in our class got pregnant. Seriously, that is why we did not read it.)
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller ( started it)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (I have read a few plays, seen more, read some poems)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien *
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *
19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger *
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot ( downloaded)
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (saw the movie)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald (downloaded)
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams *
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll *
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame *
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy *
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis *
34 Emma -Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen *
36 The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe - CS Lewis *
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini *
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres *
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden *
40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne *
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown *
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez (tried, really, I did)
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving *
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery *
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy (downloaded)
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood *
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding *
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan *
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel *
52 Dune - Frank Herbert *
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
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
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 *
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold *
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas (downloaded)
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac (parts)
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding *
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie (planning on reading)
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker *
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (downloaded)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (downloaded, not sure if I will stick it out)
76 The Inferno - Dante *
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
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell (planning to read)
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 *
87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. 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
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
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare *
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl *
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo *

Posted with Blogsy