Saturday, December 10, 2011

Timepass post

I'm thinking of switching to Wordpress, but haven’t really worked on it (procrastinating, as usual). But I've been on Blogger for so long (officially it’s been four years) that it’s hard to let go just like that. I think it must be kind of like having a new phone number and texting the people in your contacts list “Hey this is me and this is my new number”. Of course if you don’t say your name your friends may think you are some psycho stalker and hit the Delete button immediately.

The thing I like about Wordpress is, the Freshly Pressed posts you see when you open it. You discover amazing blogs / blogposts every other day. Like the one that asked you to “Please describe yourself in the most annoying way possible”, the one that made me laugh out loud, even when I thought about it afterwards –“Christmas Gift Guide: Revenge Edition”, or the “Top Ten Movies I'm Embarrassed I Haven’t Seen”.

Today I discovered a new blogpost, The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list, and the blogger had listed around 1200 books (Yeah I know the title says 1001 books). It is not the definitive list or anything, just one person's opinion, but a pretty good list there I must say. From the list I’d read a few,  some I left mid-book, bought but didn’t open, read the translated version, watched the movie, and read the comic book and abridged versions.

I went through the entire list, and here are the books which I've read. Excluding the abridged, translated, comics and movie versions. Maybe I should make my own list from this - Top 100 books I'm embarrassed I haven't read. (Oh, and try the Wordpress thing. It's much better than wasting your time on Facebook.)

(Only 37? Now I AM embarrassed. Now how many have you read from that list? Not mine you idiot.) 
  1. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
  2. Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
  3. On Beauty – Zadie Smith
  4. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon
  5. Atonement – Ian McEwan
  6. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
  7. The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
  8. The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields
  9. The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
  10. Black Water – Joyce Carol Oates
  11. The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
  12. Beloved – Toni Morrison
  13. Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
  14. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
  15. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
  16. The Godfather – Mario Puzo
  17. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey
  18. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
  19. Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  20. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
  21. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
  22. Cannery Row – John Steinbeck
  23. The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
  24. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
  25. The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
  26. Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
  27. Thank You, Jeeves – P.G. Wodehouse
  28. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
  29. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
  30. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  31. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
  32. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
  33. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
  34. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
  35. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
  36. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
  37. Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Defoe