You better not never tell nobody but God

I’m not an expert on books. I am not the most read, intelligent or insightful authority on literature. But I enjoy reading and writing about myself (= book blog magic).

From a young age, I slipped into different worlds through words. If you immerse yourself in a book, it forces you to experience things you may never come across. You can identify completely with the hero, or despise their actions. Even if you would rather sit at home, the book takes you to Hogwarts*. Either way, the story doesn't change.

No, reading Dad is Fat did not make me funny. Reading And Then There Were None did not make me a murdering mastermind (as far as you know). But books like The Color Purple do change you. If not in an epiphany sort of way, then perhaps it makes you occasionally more self-aware.

When left to my own devices, I often read similar books. Although it’s great to have personal favorites, seeing the world through the same lens can become boring. When I found out that there is a secret guild of people making long, long lists of books they want to read, I was intrigued. I love a challenge.

So here I am, powering through the good, the bad and The Fountainhead. I’m half way there and I’m ready to share the journey. Maybe I’ll review new books. Maybe I’ll revisit some of the old. Maybe I’ll just talk about my lively shenanigans. I’m sorry and you’re welcome.

(*That’s a bad example, everyone wants to go to Hogwarts.)

Books I've read:

1.       Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

2.       Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

3.       Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

4.       To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee

5.       Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte

6.       Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell

7.       Great Expectations – Charles Dickens

8.       Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

9.       Middlemarch – George Eliot

10.   Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell

11.   The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald

12.   The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

13.   Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky

14.   House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski

15.   Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

16.   The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe – CS Lewis

17.   The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini

18.   Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden

19.   Animal Farm – George Orwell

20.   The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

21.   One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

22.   Lord of the Flies – William Golding

23.   Life of Pi – Yann Martel

24.   Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

25.   The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon

26.   Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

27.   Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

28.   Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas

29.   Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding

30.   The Color Purple – Alice Walker

31.   The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand

32.   The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro

33.   The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery (In French)

34.   Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

35.   The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver

36.   Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut

37.   Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe

38.   Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl - Anne Frank

39.   Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? - Philip K. Dick

40.   And Then There Were None - Agatha Christie

41.   Tuesdays with Morrie - Mitch Albom

42.   All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque

43.   Dad is Fat – Jim Gaffigan

44.   The Help - Kathryn Stockett

45.   The Art of Racing in the Rain - Garth Stein

46.   Bossypants – Tina Fey

47.   The Code of the Woosters - P. G. Wodehouse

48.   Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

49.   I Know this Much is True – Wally Lamb

50.   Matched (Series) - Ally Condie

51.   Hunger Games (Series) - Suzanne Collins

52.   The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brien

53.   The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner

54.   Little Women - Louisa May Alcott

55.   The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne

56.   A Room with a View - E. M. Forster

57.   Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury

58.   A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Betty Smith

59.   A Separate Peace - John Knowles

60.   Holes - Louis Sachar

61.   The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

62.   Spud – John van de Ruit

63.   My Sister’s Keeper – Jodi Picoult

64.   Chocolat – Joanne Harris

65.   The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency – Alexander McCall Smith

66.   The Red Tent – Anita Diamant

67.   We Need to Talk About Kevin – Lionel Shriver

Books I want to read:

68.   The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

69.   Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

70.   Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris

71.   Rocket Boys - Homer Hickam, Jr.

72.   Beloved – Toni Morrison

73.   The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler

74.   Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

75.   The God of Small Things

76.   I Capture the Castle - Dodie Smith

77.   If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things - Jon McGregor

78.   An Instance of the Fingerpost - Iain Pears

79.   The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat: And Other Clinical Tales - Oliver Sacks

80.   Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie

81.   Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad

82.   The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

83.   Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston

84.   Emma - Jane Austen

85.   Gulliver's travels - Jonathan Swift

86.   The World According to Garp - John Irving

87.   Atonement - Ian McEwan

88.   The Unbearable Lightness of Being - Milan Kundera

89.   The Red Badge of Courage - Stephen Crane

90.   Cat's Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut

91.   Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert

92.   What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver

93.   Freakonomics - Steven D Levitt & Stephen J Dubner

94.   A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh

95.   Q & A – Vikas Swarup

96.   Mort – Terry Pratchett

97.   The Other Boleyn Girl – Philippa Gregory

98.   Magician – Raymond E Feist

99.   A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry

100. Saturday – Ian McEwan

101. American Psycho – Bret Easton Ellis

102. Libra – Don DeLillo

103. She’s Come Undone – Wally Lamb

104.  Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – Jane Austen, Seth Grahame-Smith

105. Blackbox - Nick Walker

106. A Million Little Pieces – James Frey

107. Autobiography of Red – Anne Carson

108. Jamilia – Chingiz Aitmatov

109. The Third Eye-  David Knowles

110. Most Talkative - Andy Cohen

111. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulk

112. The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
113. Dale Loves Sophie to Death - Rob Forman Dew
114. The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrad
115. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
116. The Silent Wife - A.S.A. Harrison

Books I will NEVER read:

 Lord of the Rings

The English Patient

Grapes of Wrath

War and Peace (because I don’t like tourture)

Twilight

Fifty Shades of Grey

Feel free to add, discuss and slander the list.