P.S ... The First In A Series Of Pretentious Tagging Posts

With ONLY two days' rest before I start prepping for the finals, there's not enough time for me to cook up a "pwopah" post, so I'll be having fun with some of the interesting 'tag' memes that pop up on various blogs and social-networking sites.

Here's the first, off Minerva, who in turn got it off AJOBA, "N" (two VERY good blogs) and although I have one or two fundamental problems with it which I'll mention at the end, it's a pretty good exercise.

Off we go then !!

THE BBC BOOK MEME

Apparently, the BBC believes that most people will have read only 6 of the books listed below. Here are the rules:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘X’ after those you have read.
2) Tally your total at the bottom.
3) Tag a few people you think would enjoy sharing similar information about their book interests.

I've tweaked the concept a bit by adding extra x's depending on how much I like the books....

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen – x (I was very young ,can’t be blamed)

2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien – xx (The phrase “well-thumbed copy” is an understatement)

3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte – x (The perfect mix of Gothic and sappy)

4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling – xx (Potterhead to the core, I can still remember the 8-hour marathon reads when the new ones came out)

5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee – xx (A book that’s funny, moving and makes you think of Gregory Peck, my idea of heaven!)

6 The Bible

7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell – x (Thoughtcrime doesn’t entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death!)

9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens – x ( I prefer the original, starker ending to the revised, happier one)

11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott – x (The 1933 movie version, with Katharine Hepburn as Jo March, like totally rules)

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller –("I’m not ashamed,’ Yossarian said. ‘I’m just afraid.")

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - + (Does 70% count?)

15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier – xx (Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with Larry Olivier as Maxim, Joan Fontaine as the 2^nd Mr. Winter and the spine-tinglingly good Judith Anderson as the housekeeper; the 1940 movie trumps the book)

16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien – xx (Probably the most fruitful purchase of my life,The Hobbit,The Lord Of The Rings and the first two Potters – all for 600 rupees in 2001)

17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk -

18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger –x (Seems a lot less depressing at each subsequent re-read)

19 The Time Traveler’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger -

20 Middlemarch - George Eliot -

21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell – (Does the movie count? I don’t think so)

22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald – xx (The Jazz Age in it’s greatest interpretation, read with Louis Armstrong playing “Tiger Rag” in the background)

23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens -

24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy – x (Exhausting, but oh-so-very rewarding)

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams – xxx (Oh fruddled Gruntbuggly, thy micturitions are to me…; Genius!!!)

27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky – x (Who hasn’t identified with Raskolnikov at least once in their life)

28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck – xx (The mind-numbingly stark beauty of the book is brilliantly equalled by John Ford’s masterly film version)

29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll – x (…and”Through The Looking Glass”, who needs LSD when you’ve got Alice)

30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame – x (What an utterly brilliant children’s book, and what an utterly brilliant TV show)

31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy –x (Gets more depressing with each subsequent re-read)

32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens – x (Dickens’ de-facto autobiography)

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 – x (Doesn’t make up for the fact that Milne was, to put it lightly, a twit!)

41 Animal Farm - George Orwell – xx (The book I’ve got 20 copies of, to distribute among random strangers)

42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – x (I apologize. In the words of Stephen Fry,” Complete loose-stool-water.
Arse-gravy of the very worst kind.”)

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – xxx (I read it when I was 15, way too young for it. Thankfully I’ve never completely recovered)

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving -

45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins – x (A personal milestone, the first book I ever pinched from a library!)

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 – x (Brilliant, but everyone I’ve recommended it to seems to hate it)

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 – x (I seem to have read a lot of Dickens, lucky me!!)

58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley – x (One of my prize possessions, a First Edition from 1932)

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night - Mark Haddon – x (Heard it as a play on the BBC, read it 4 years later.)

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez – x (With characters named ‘Saint-Amour’ and ‘Escolastica’, I was hooked before I began)

61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck -

62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov – (Even if Kubrick,Peter Sellers and James Mason hadn’t done wonders with it, it would still have been brilliant)

63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt -

64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold -

65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas – x (Revenge is sweet)

66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac – xx (Liberating like nothing else I've ever read)

67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy -

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding -

69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie -

70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville – x (The Great American Novel)

71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens – x (Slightly anti-Semitic, but Fagan is teh man!!)

72 Dracula - Bram Stoker – x (I never drink . . . wine)

73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett -

74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson -

75 Ulysses - James Joyce – x (Joyce took the English novel and split its head open. Thank heavens for that)
76 The Inferno – Dante – x (I wonder which circle of Hell Machiavelli would’ve been in)

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 – x (What can I say…..)

82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell -

83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker -

84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro – x (The dark side of the Wodehouse world, with Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins straining to do their characters justice)

85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert – x (anyone who wants to know what a perfect sentence reads like MUST read Bovary, and take notes)

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 – xx (The Complete Illustrated Collection, awesomeness!!)

90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton -

91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad – x ("The horror! The horror!")

92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery – xxx (The greatest book written for children. Period.)

93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks -

94 Watership Down - Richard Adams – x (I can’t thank my folks enough for keeping me away from Enid Blyton and giving me Watership Down when I was 9)

95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole – xx (“My valve has closed” – brilliantness!)

96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute -

97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas – x (Am I a perve, or are there serious homoerotic undertones in this book?)

98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare – xx (I finally found out where half of all the English quotations come from)

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl – x (Screw political correctness, the Oompah-Loompahs RULE)

100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo – xxxx (Talk about reading the right book at the right time. I owe a lot to Jean Valjean, Threnardier and the Bishop)

My score : 52/100

Not bad, but there's things fundamentally wrong with the list above. No Wodehouse, no Vonnegut, no Updike, no Bellow, no Poe, and worse of all...no Mark Twain. I mean, come on !! wher's Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer?

Anyhoo, anyone who reads this is automatically tagged, but since that only includes me and a bicycle repairman named Majid, I think some affirmative tagging action is necessary.

Movies Of The Week ; The Hangover,District 9, Eraserhead,Blue Velvet

Music Of The Week, Zubeeda Khanum