The "100 Books the BBC Think Most People Haven't Read More than 6 of" Tag

Olivia at Meanwhile, in Rivendell, tagged me with this recently, so here goes!

(I snurched this from Movies Meet Their Match)

Rules:

1. Be honest.
2. Put an asterisk next to the ones you have read all the way through. Put an addition sign next to the ones you have started.
3. Tag as many people as there are books on the list that you have read.

Because I've reviewed quite a few of these, I'll be linking titles to my reviews as applicable, okay?

Books:

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen * 
2. Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervyn Peake
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë *
4. Temple of the Golden Pavilion - Yukio Mishima
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee *
6. The Story of the Eye - George Bataille
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë *
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell 
9. Adrift on the Nile - Naguib Mahfouz
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens *
11. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott *
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
14. Rhinoceros - Eugene Ionesco
15. Baron in the Trees - Italo Calvino
16. The Master of Go - Yasunari Kawabata
17. Woman in the Dunes - Abe Kobo
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger *
19. The Feast of the Goat - Mario Vargas Llosa
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot *

(John Wayne)

21. Gogol's Wife - Tomasso Landolfi
22. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald *
23. Magic Mountain - Thomas Mann
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. Ferdydurke - Gombrowicz
26. Narcissus and Goldmund - Herman Hesse
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 
28. The 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. The Jungle - Upton Sinclair
33. Tom Sawyer / Huck Finn - Mark Twain **
34. Emma - Jane Austen *
35. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe *
36. Delta Wedding - Eudora Welty
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini 
38. Naomi - Junichiro Tanizaki
39. Cosmicomics - Italo Calvino
40. The Joke - Milan Kundera

(Sir Ian McKellen)

41. Animal Farm - George Orwell *
42. Labyrinths - Gorge Luis Borges
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving 
45. Under My Skin - Doris Lessing
46. Anne of Green Gables - L. M. Montgomery *
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy 
48. Don Quixote - Miguel Cervantes 
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding *
50. Absalom Absalom - William Faulkner
51. Beloved - Toni Morrison
52. The Flounder - Gunther Grass
53. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen *
55. My Name is Red - Orhan Pamuk
56. A Dolls House - Henrik Ibsen *
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Idiot - Fyodor Dostoevesky 
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez

(Clint Eastwood)

61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck *
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman +
64. Death on the Installment Plan - Celine
65. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas *
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Pedro Paramo - Juan Rulfo
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens *
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker *
73. The Metamorphosis - Kafka
74. Epitaph of a Small Winner - Machado De Assis
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Inferno - Dante 
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome +
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. To the Light House - Virginia Woolf 
80. Disgrace - John Maxwell Coetzee

(William Powell and Myrna Loy)

81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens *
82. Zorba the Greek - Nikos Kazantzakis
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Box Man - Abe Kobo
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert +
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. The Stranger - Camus
88. Acquainted with the Night - Heinrich Boll
89. Don't Call It Night - Amos Oz
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93. Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pychon
94. Memoirs of Hadrian - Marguerite Yourcenar
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas *
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare *
99. Faust - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe +
100. Metamorphosis - Ovid 

So... that's 29 read, I believe.  Not quite a third, but then, I'm possibly done with just over a third of my life, so I guess that's okay :-)

(Alan Ladd and his daughter Alana)

"The Trials of Sherlock Holmes" by James Moffett

When I found out that James Moffett of the wonderful blog A Tolkienist's Perspective was also a fan of Sherlock Holmes, I was pretty excited.  You may remember that I very much enjoyed participating in his read-along of The Silmarillion, and I continue to appreciate his insights into Tolkien.  I've also enjoyed his new Holmes-related blog, A Palace for the Mind. 

So I was eager to read James Moffett's own foray into Sherlock Holmes pastiche.  And I'm happy to say that the mysteries here are more twisty than any I could ever come up with.  They also all tie together into one unified puzzle pretty nicely.  

If you are a fan of the BBC series Sherlock, you will probably like this.  It's got the Victorian London setting of the canonical stories, but I found the characterizations to be very much informed by the BBC show.  The Holmes in this book is "cheeky" (p. 119) and "mischievous" (p. 145), and other anachronisms such as a kitchen in the 221B apartment also seem derived from the show rather than the book.  

In the end, I found this book a fun way to pass the time.  Just right for a little light summer reading.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG for various dangerous situations.  No bad language, no adult situations, nothing gruesome.

"Conspiracy of Silence" by Ronie Kendig

Imagine a story that's a cross between an Indiana Jones movie and Jack Reacher book, and you've pretty much nailed what Conspiracy of Silence is like.  You've got archaeologists discovering Biblical artifacts and unleashing a plague.  You've got a bunch of top-notch modern warriors going after lots of scary bad guys who want to weaponize that plague.  You've got a female FBI agent who specializes in detecting deception who helps figure out who's lying to the warriors and who truly wants to help them.  Oh, and one archaeologist is the sister of one of the warriors, and that warrior's brother used to be married to the FBI agent's sister.  Just to tangle everything up more, because more tangling is always good for a thriller.

This was a very engrossing book, one that sucked me in a bit slowly, but then held me fast.  Also, the Knights Templar are just always a good time, aren't they?  I can't remember any story involving them that I haven't liked, from Ivanhoe to The Maltese Falcon.  This is the beginning of a series, so while the central problem is resolved, there are still some loose threads left that will continue into the next book.

Particularly Good Bits:

Some people had emotional baggage.  Cole Russell had an entire department store (p. 272).

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for a lot of violence.  Many, many fight scenes, shootings, deaths, etc.  

Note: I received a copy of this book from the publisher for me to read while judging the INSPY awards. In no way did I agree to review this book in exchange. These are my honest opinions.

The Classics Book Tag

Jillian tagged me with this rather enchanting blog tag three months ago.  Thanks, Jillian!  I don't think I've ever done a blog tag devoted entirely to classics.  I'm sorry it's taken me so long to fill it out.

1. An over-hyped classic you really didn't like:  Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck.  I loathe it for its deliberate, gleeful cruelty.

2. Favorite time period to read about:  America's Wild West and the Jazz Age both fascinate me.

3. Favorite fairy tale:  "The Twelve Dancing Princesses" and "Cinderella" are high on my list.

4. Most embarrassing classic to admit you haven't read:  The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins.  Everyone talks about how it's one of the best early mysteries, but I just haven't read it yet.

5. Top 5 classics you want to read:  Death Comes to the Archbishop by Willa Cather, The Deerslayer by James Fenimore Cooper, The Once and Future King by T. H. White, The Screwtape Letters by C. S. Lewis, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte.

6. Favorite modern book/series based on a classic:  Dear Mr. Knightley by Katherine Reay is a fantastic modern retelling of Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster mixed with various other things.

7. Favorite movie version/tv series based on a classic: The Lord of the Rings trilogy directed by Peter Jackson is pretty hard to top.

8. Worst classic-to-movie adaptation:  Possibly the 1969 adaptation of Hamlet starring Nicol Williamson.

9. Favorite editions you'd like to collect more of:  I'd like to have a matching set of all of Patrick O'Brien's naval novels about Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin.  I own all of them, but most of them are matching trade paperbacks... and three aren't.  It bothers me they don't match.  Or, one day I could trade up for this wonderful edition:

10. An under-hyped classic:  More people need to read The Blue Castle by Lucy Maud Montgomery.

It took me a very long time to fill out this tag, so I'm not going to tag anyone.  If you'd like to do this tag yourself, go right ahead :-)  It's certainly a fun one!

"When Death Draws Near" by Carrie Stuart Parks

I can't recall ever before reading a mystery written from the point of view of an artist who does facial reconstructions for law enforcement.  That was such a unique and cool angle to look at cases from, in and of itself, but add in an Appalachian setting, and you know I was hooked.  Though the rest of the series doesn't take place in Appalachia, I'm hoping my library has the previous books, because I also quite liked the protagonist, forensic artist Gwen Marcey.

I also appreciated that, although some of the cases Marcey investigated were rapes, there was no gratuitous or graphic description of the crimes.  For a modern-day thriller/mystery in the vein of Kathy Reichs, it was not squeamishness-inducing, which I very much liked.

Basically, Gwen Marcey gets called in by the sheriff of a small Kentucky town to help draw identifying sketches of a rapist from descriptions provided by his victims.  She winds up investigating a snake-handling church and unraveling a decades-old murder.

My one real quibble with this book is that Marcey has a teen daughter who is fairly stereotypical, especially at first, and mostly seems just there to be put in danger so the protagonist has someone to feel protective of and something more than her own life to lose.  Not enough to make me stop enjoying the book, though!  I fully intend to read more of this series.

If This was a Movie, I Would Rate It:  PG-13 for discussion of rapes and murders, characters in grave danger, and violence.  Also, snakes and spiders.

Note:  I received a copy of this book from the publisher for me to read while judging the INSPY awards.  In no way did I agree to review this book in exchange.  These are my honest opinions.

"Great Gatsby" Read-Along Index

Here are the links to my individual chapter posts from this read-along, for easy reference in the future:

Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Final Thoughts

Just because I've finished posting about The Great Gatsby does not mean you need to stop commenting on the posts!  I know some of the participants haven't finished the book yet, and that is totally fine.  I am happy to continue discussing this book for as long as you like.

Winners of the Gatsby Giveaway

For the first time ever, I had more prizes than I had people competing for them!  That makes the whole name-drawing process very painless for me (I always feel sad for the people who don't win one of my giveaways), but it leaves me with a spare set of prizes.  I'm going to divide the extra set evenly among the winners, so you'll each be getting a little something extra as a surprise.

Oh yes!  The winners are:

Emma L. -- stickers

John S. -- greeting cards

Dale B. -- greeting cards

Sarah H. -- postcards

I'll be emailing you this morning to ask for your mailing addresses so I can send you your prizes.  And your surprises!

Thanks for playing, folks!  And thanks for participating in the read-along -- I know some people aren't finished reading yet, and that's fine.  I'll merrily continue to discuss the book as long as you like!