31. But is it normal that there were another 32 that I wouldn't even pick up and read if they were just sitting there languishing on my shelf/kindle? One of those was the complete works of Mr Shakespeare. Maybe I'd dip into one play but read the whole lot and the sonnets with all that rhyming - no thanks - I'd rather read Jean-Paul Satre's The Roads To Freedom trilogy again!
6 - rather embarrassingly accurate! I do actually read, im just too busy watching TV to do it so much. A lot on that list dont really interest me either. Although i will soon be starting Nineteen Eighty-Four when it arrives, so ill claim my 7th shortly
Excellent book, although quite eerie, and very inspirational in today's standards as room 101 and big brother both came from the book. It is a dystopian view on the future (future from when it was written) in contrast to aldous Huxley and brave new world which is quite the opposite.
How comes Hamlet is an entry when there's also The Complete Works by the same author? Is the title of The Complete Works actually a lie?
I've not gone near a Dan Brown doorstop since I read Digital Fortress, which is the worse book I've ever read. How anyone can include Dan Brown in such is list is beyond me.
Disappointed there's only one proper science fiction book, Dune. Something by Asimov, Clarke or maybe Banks's Culture series would not have been out of place.
Well you would curl up with a good Jane Austen whilst we were getting mashed at Berwick Manor etc.
What's the point of curling up with a good Jane Austen? Give me a disreputable Jane Austen any day of the week. Oh, wait, you mean a book by Jane Austen, not a woman called Jane...
Jane Austen was far too romantic for modern men, now the bronte sisters would be much more tolerant. Mr Rochester far more rough and ready and manly than that nice Mr Darcy.
I don't find Austen overly romantic. In fact I don't think she's all that romantic at all and its a shame if she's read like that. Her novels are primarily witty social satire on the upper/middle class obsession with money and breeding 200 years ago.
Surprised myself - 46 read and a couple of others on the shelf still unread.
Not had considering most of them hadn't been written when you were at school.
Steady on, Mehmet ......... you mean the authors of The Bible, Will Shakespeare, Jane Austen and Charlie Dickens wrote their stuff during the last 40 years?
8. As others have said, strange list - several books by certain authors, none by others - P.G. Wodehouse and Graham Greene being two stand out examples of that - I have read books by several authors on the list, just not ones they have picked (Hardy, Fitzgerald, Steinbeck and Shakespeare [at school] ). Again I agree that the clever plot but poor writing of Dan Brown does not really belong on a great writer's list. A lot of children's books on there too, some of which I may have read but don't remember (Swallows and Amazons?). Only one travel book (Bryson) and no autobiographies or detective/thrillers. Odd.
I read tons, but I've only read seven of those books. Yesterday I finished Heaven Is A Playground, one of the finest sports books ever – it's like The Wire of 1970s NY street basketball. And this morning I started Iain Sinclair's American Smoke.
It's a bizarre list. Three by Austen but none by Elliot. No Trollope, no Cervantes, no Murakami. No science fiction, no historical fiction, no detective novels, no westerns. Most bizzarely just one work of non-fiction (two if you include the Bible). I could go on...incessantly
It's a bizarre list. Three by Austen but none by Elliot. No Trollope, no Cervantes, no Murakami. No science fiction, no historical fiction, no detective novels, no westerns. Most bizzarely just one work of non-fiction (two if you include the Bible). I could go on...incessantly
There is one sci-fi - Dune - but I agree, a strange list.
6 - rather embarrassingly accurate! I do actually read, im just too busy watching TV to do it so much. A lot on that list dont really interest me either. Although i will soon be starting Nineteen Eighty-Four when it arrives, so ill claim my 7th shortly
Excellent book, although quite eerie, and very inspirational in today's standards as room 101 and big brother both came from the book. It is a dystopian view on the future (future from when it was written) in contrast to aldous Huxley and brave new world which is quite the opposite.
Are you sure? I always thought that Brave New World was as dystopian as it gets. Have you been on the soma?
I read it 35 years ago though when I might have been going through a dark period!
6 - rather embarrassingly accurate! I do actually read, im just too busy watching TV to do it so much. A lot on that list dont really interest me either. Although i will soon be starting Nineteen Eighty-Four when it arrives, so ill claim my 7th shortly
Excellent book, although quite eerie, and very inspirational in today's standards as room 101 and big brother both came from the book. It is a dystopian view on the future (future from when it was written) in contrast to aldous Huxley and brave new world which is quite the opposite.
Are you sure? I always thought that Brave New World was as dystopian as it gets. Have you been on the soma?
I read it 35 years ago though when I might have been going through a dark period!
I read it when I was a teenager and thought their world sounded pretty good. Everyone was happy, after all.
Then I read Huxley's Brave New World Revisited and it's absolutely clear that Huxley was writing it as a dystopia. Here's the first paragraph:
In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching -- these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds -- the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.
6 - rather embarrassingly accurate! I do actually read, im just too busy watching TV to do it so much. A lot on that list dont really interest me either. Although i will soon be starting Nineteen Eighty-Four when it arrives, so ill claim my 7th shortly
Excellent book, although quite eerie, and very inspirational in today's standards as room 101 and big brother both came from the book. It is a dystopian view on the future (future from when it was written) in contrast to aldous Huxley and brave new world which is quite the opposite.
Are you sure? I always thought that Brave New World was as dystopian as it gets. Have you been on the soma?
I read it 35 years ago though when I might have been going through a dark period!
It was supposed to be a utopian view of the future, everyone genetically modified to perfection for the alphas a little less perfect for the betas, the hard work no complaints and lower class of the Gammas and deltas the overall everyone being conditioned to be happy, no hassles of relationship sex is free to all and shared with all within a safe enclosed little world, the dystopian feel was because you are predominately normal and you and me and the rest of us would be classed as savages doing things such as manual work, marriage and even worse child birth. I suppose it's how you look at things 1984 was more accurate in comparison but was very negative intentionally whereas brave new world was meant to be painted colourful and cheery until you look at the whole picture, this is what I meant.
Comments
How comes Hamlet is an entry when there's also The Complete Works by the same author? Is the title of The Complete Works actually a lie?
I've not gone near a Dan Brown doorstop since I read Digital Fortress, which is the worse book I've ever read. How anyone can include Dan Brown in such is list is beyond me.
Disappointed there's only one proper science fiction book, Dune. Something by Asimov, Clarke or maybe Banks's Culture series would not have been out of place.
It's back to school for you sunshine!
;o)
I too confess to Brigit Jones' Diary.
I read it 35 years ago though when I might have been going through a dark period!
prettiestmost well-read wife at homeThen I read Huxley's Brave New World Revisited and it's absolutely clear that Huxley was writing it as a dystopia. Here's the first paragraph:
In 1931, when Brave New World was being written, I was convinced that there was still plenty of time. The completely organized society, the scientific caste system, the abolition of free will by methodical conditioning, the servitude made acceptable by regular doses of chemically induced happiness, the orthodoxies drummed in by nightly courses of sleep-teaching -- these things were coming all right, but not in my time, not even in the time of my grandchildren. I forget the exact date of the events recorded in Brave New World; but it was somewhere in the sixth or seventh century A.F. (After Ford). We who were living in the second quarter of the twentieth century A.D. were the inhabitants, admittedly, of a gruesome kind of universe; but the nightmare of those depression years was radically different from the nightmare of the future, described in Brave New World. Ours was a nightmare of too little order; theirs, in the seventh century A.F., of too much. In the process of passing from one extreme to the other, there would be a long interval, so I imagined, during which the more fortunate third of the human race would make the best of both worlds -- the disorderly world of liberalism and the much too orderly Brave New World where perfect efficiency left no room for freedom or personal initiative.