Daily Blague

Here's a list of book titles that I found at Patricia Storms's Booklust. And here's the code: books that I've read, books on my shelves, books that I might read, and books that I won't read. Finally, (books that I don't know anything about).

The DaVinci Code. It was awful, and I got rid of it.

The Catcher in the Rye. But I haven't read this as an adult.

To Kill A Mockingbird. But not as an adult.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Never.

The Great Gatsby. The perfect novella.

(The Time Traveler's Wife).

His Dark Materials. I'm much too old.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Ditto. 

The Life of Pi. Kathleen loved it.

Animal Farm. I doubt that I'll read this, but not enough to strike it out.

Catch 22. Ditto. There was something about the way guys in high school talked about this book that put me off it.

The Hobbit. I did read the trilogy, at much the same time that I discovered Wagner. I kept the Wagner and lost the Tolkien.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A lovely book, with a desperately exciting adventure at the end.

Lord of the Flies. I don't think I've read this, but I may be wrong.

Pride and Prejudice. This will never be my favorite Austen, but I do love it.

1984. The consensus seems to be that Huxley was right, not Orwell. But I don't think I'd read Brave New World either.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Who organized this list?

One Hundred Years of Solitude. I hate magic realism.

Memoirs of a Geisha. A good read. But for the real experience, try to catch Kenji Mizoguchi's Gion Bayashi (A Geisha).

The Kite Runner. I liked this more than I thought I would.

The Lovely Bones. The negative reviews that this bit of bogusness received in respectable periodicals got to be quite funny.

Slaughterhouse 5. See Catch 22.

The Secret History. I've read this twice. It's super.

Wuthering Heights. I had to read this for school. I found it rather dull.

The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. I'm probably too old for this, too.

Middlesex. I read the early part of this book in a magazine.

Cloud Atlas. My radar says, "Don't," but it's not shrieking.

Jane Eyre. Unlikely but possible.

Atonement. And everything else by Ian McEwan.

(The Shadow of the Wind).

The Old Man and the Sea. This is bad Hemingway. Or so I'm told.

The Handmaid's Tale. I am committed to doing everything that I can to keep what I understand the scenario of this book to be from being realized. I don't need its details clunking around in my head.

The Bell Jar. Probably not, but maybe.

Dune. I love David Lynch's film, though. Herbert's prose style makes me giggle. For about thirty seconds.

(Sula).

Cold Mountain. This was a good, old-fashioned gripper.

(The Alchemist).

White Teeth. The first, and probably the last, thing that I read by Zadie Smith was On Beauty. It was full of powerful scenes and affecting passages, but it completely failed to hang together as a novel.

The House of Mirth. Of course! Where's Henry James?

And, just for the hell of it, I'm going to add a fortieth title: The Corrections.

That enables me to claim a quarter of the titles. Which sounds just about right for a non-professional reader. My being me, there are more books that I won't read than books that I have read, and only a few tempters. (I don't believe that the Tolkien and Rowling books belong on a list like this, by the way.) I suppose I ought to print this up and nail it to the wall.