I should be in bed but I've been reading Junji Ito's Uzumaki and now I can't sleep because the spirals will eat me.

Okay, this wasn't one of the things I planned to backdate but frankly I don't have the patience to write an entry about the review I left on that godawful Marisa Star Trek Suefic just yet, so I'm not going to. I blame the fact that I feel tired and shitty and have been all day, and my brain's utter refusal to stop pestering me to write really bad and plotless Ken porn that would have weiss_badfics beating a path to my door if only I actually finished it and posted it somewhere. Which I don't plan to. Post it, I mean. Because it wouldn't be very good.

So that means memes, of course. I like memes. I saw this one knocking about the place over on Journalfen and decided to do it for the sheer fun of it and because it would take about ten minutes and I'm lazy. Not sure I totally believe the assertion that 'most people' will only have read six books on the list or that the BBC were the ones who said so, but here goes anyway.

The BBC (apparently) believes that most people will have read only six of the hundred books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Bold means I read it and finished it;
Italic means I didn't finish it;
Underlined means I read it for school; if it's then bold I read it again later; italics and I didn't finish it.

This is otherwise known as the meme in which laila's occasional tendency to lose books halfway through reading them and never see them again, ever, comes back to bite her in the ass but good. It doesn't help that I got half of these off my mum and couldn't take all my books with me when I left home, this place already looks like a book depository and I had to leave what must have been half my books in Kent due to a severe lack of space.l Some day, she says, I will have my own apartment and actual bookshelves.

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
   
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
   
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
   
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
   
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
   
6. The Bible
   
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
   
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
   
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
   
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
    
12. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
    
13. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
    
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare
    
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
    
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
    
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
    
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
    
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
    
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 - AA Milne
    
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
    
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
    
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
    
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
    
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
    
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
    
68. Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
    
69. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
    
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
    
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
    
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker
    
73. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
    
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
    
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
    
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
    
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 - EB 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
     

Okay, so I also read The Great Gatsby and Animal Farm for school, but I don't count them as set texts because I'd read them for fun before.

If I only got on with Dickens I'd be doing a lot better, but his work just isn't really to may taste. I made several doomed attempts to read Great Expectations as a wee one and just couldn't get through it. Repeated experiments with other Dickens novels only served to confirm me in that opinion. One of the things I dread about trying to write The Book is that I should probably read some Dickens for the social commentary and good God but I have problems with him and I don't even know why. I read Anna Karenina and loved it but can I get through Hard Times? Can I shit.

That aside, some of my very favorite books are on this list - Lolita, Brideshead Revisited, The Great Gatsby, Notes from a Small Island, The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Catch-22 would all be on my extensive desert island reading list. I honestly have no idea what this says about me except that I probably read too much and am trying too hard to Look Clever.

If you take nothing else away from this, take this: clearly, I should not be allowed to read Junji Ito's manga. Drr... drr... drr...