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10 Books Meme

  • Sep. 22nd, 2014 at 9:38 PM
Library Sam
galwithglasses
I've seen this a couple of places now, most recently at hugemind's journal.

Rules: In a text post, list ten books that have stayed with you in some way. Don't take but a few minutes, and don't think too hard - they don't have to be "right" or "great" works, just the ones that have touched you. Tag ten friends. Do this if you want to. :)

There are a lot of books that have stuck with me, and these are some that I'm glad I read.  In no particular order with the number stretched to 15 because I've been reading for 40 years -

  1. The Outsiders - S.E. Hinton

  2. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee

  3. Slaughterhouse Five - Kurt Vonnegut

  4. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain

  5. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

  6. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeline L'Engle

  7. A River Runs Through It - Norman Maclean

  8. Island of the Blue Dolphins -  Scott O'Dell

  9. The Killer Angels - Michael Shaara

  10. The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien

  11. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

  12. A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett

  13. Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer

  14. Hiroshima - John Hersey

  15. Johnny Lion's Rubber Boots - Edith Thacher Hurd



Here is a list of books I read that I wish hadn't.

  1. Silas Marner - George Eliot

  2. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens

  3. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger

  4. Twilight - Stephenie Meyer

  5. The Light in the Forest - Conrad Richter

  6. A Separate Peace - John Knowles

  7. When the Legends Die - Hal Borland

  8. Angels and Demons - Dan Brown

  9. Harriet the Spy - Louise Fitzhugh

  10. The Giving Tree - Shel Silverstein

  11. How to Eat Fried Worms - Thomas Rockwell

Lucky me, I escaped Lord of the Flies, Old Yeller, Where the Red Fern Grows, and the Scarlet Letter.  How about you?

  • Current Music:Life is a Highway - Tom Cochrane

Comments

( 19 comments — Leave a comment )
hugemind
Sep. 23rd, 2014 03:45 am (UTC)
I've read numbers 3, 5, and 10. And numbers 3 and 8 on the second list.

LotR seems pop up on all the lists. And seeing Hitchhiker mentioned often too makes me all sorts of happy. :)
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:33 am (UTC)
1 is basically Winchesters as greasers with a few extra friends and the popular crowd as demons. Did you like Catcher in the Rye? Holden Caufield annoyed me greatly but he's an interesting character. I wasn't crazy about LotR when I read it the first time but I read it with my kid at a different point in life and I got a whole lot more out of it. Douglas Adams just has the best sentence brain ever. I started with the radio show when it was first on. So much fun. A couple of the books on the second list might as well have been Vogon poetry.
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hugemind
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:13 pm (UTC)
Hmmm, The Outsiders has that SPN connection, so maybe I should look into it. I read Catcher in the Rye maybe about 15 years ago, so don't remember much of it. I think it was actually the first book I read in English; I don't remember hating it, though. Douglas Adams has also awesomely funny similes. :D
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:34 pm (UTC)
It's a fast read and for a while in school, it was the closest thing to contemporary that we were assigned even though it was set in the 50's-ish. Angst, brothers looking after each other…
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davidbrider
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:40 pm (UTC)
Personally I tend to the belief that Hitchhiker, whilst good, is probably not the best of the Hitchhiker novels (my personal favourite is So long, and thanks for all the fish, although Restaurant... and Life, the universe and everything are also really strong too), and definitely not the best of Adams' work overall (most Adams' fans seem to reckon Last chance to see is his career highlight, although admittedly I've not read it myself...but I'll happily put in a good word for the first Dirk Gently book...)
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:38 pm (UTC)
My memory isn't really so great any more and I can't remember what happened in which of Adams' books. The first one is the only one that I can really remember quotes from. I loved all of them though and Dirk Gently too.
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hugemind
Sep. 25th, 2014 03:31 pm (UTC)
To me it's just one big book ("trilogy in five parts") that has a really long name (HHGTTG) because that's how I've always read it. :D I've yet to read it in the original language although I do have the book, so I'll need to keep an eye out for the separate novels then. I have read the Dirk Gently books as well, but can't really remember much about them as it was a long time ago. Last Chance to see is something I've never heard of before.
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frelling_tralk
Sep. 23rd, 2014 07:56 am (UTC)
The Outsiders was one that I debated adding to my list, that left a great impression on me when I first read it
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 01:58 pm (UTC)
It was the one book we were assigned in school that everybody wanted to take class time to read and the 'no spoiler' rule was in place long before we called them spoilers. I listened to the Bridge Over Troubled Water album non-stop while reading it and they are forever linked in my head. I couldn't narrow my list down to 10 and I gave up and made the list longer. So many good books.
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amberdreams
Sep. 23rd, 2014 03:19 pm (UTC)
Damn I should have done a list of wish I hadn'ts too! LOL. Twilight would have been on there for me too. I actually liked Lord of the Flies even though we did it at school, and I wasn't aware there was a book of Old Yeller. The film broke my heart when I was ten. I did love jack London's Call of the Wild though.
I agree on Dan Brown too - read one of his and you've read them all - I read The Da Vinci Code then Angels and Demons and realised they were exactly the same plot just slightly different circumstances. I'd add Wilbur Smith to the wish I hadn't - can't remember the title but he was obsessed with telling me the make and detail about every vehicle that appeared in the damn book.Way to take the thrill out of thriller.

I could also have added Hitchiker's Guide (and Neverwhere), Island of Blue Dolphins - and Walkabout, to my faves list.
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:46 pm (UTC)
I've heard good things about Neverwhere. I think it was Angels and Demons where the crime stuff seemed particularly brutal but it could have been either one. I usually do ok with reading about violence but for some reason it really bothered me. The plot was pretty much retread though.

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amberdreams
Sep. 24th, 2014 05:53 pm (UTC)
I really love Neil Gaiman's prose, and the whole concept of Neverwhere was just wonderful. I'd actually recommend watching the BBC adaptation of it, that was really good.
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ghyste
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:01 pm (UTC)
HHGTTG would have got I to my list bI came to it first via the radio show.

My list of things I wish I'd never read would probably be mainly composed of Thomas Hardy.
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:51 pm (UTC)
Never had to read any Hardy so now I can be grateful. I loved the HH radio show but the whole series of books was a lot of fun. Somewhere on my ipod I have the Journey of the Sorcerer that the radio show used as the theme.
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amberdreams
Sep. 24th, 2014 05:54 pm (UTC)
Oh yes, the only Thomas Hardy I enjoyed was the Woodlanders. Turn of the Screw by Henry James was excruciatingly boring too.
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davidbrider
Sep. 23rd, 2014 04:37 pm (UTC)
A Little Princess - Frances Hodgson Burnett

Oh yes, totally! That's one I should add to my list if I do it again. I mean, I read it after I saw the 1987 TV adaptation, but still...wonderful book.

Silas Marner - George Eliot

Really? I rather liked it - a rare instance of a book I had to read for O-levels actually turning out to be one I enjoyed.

The one I read (for school) that I regret reading was Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea, because...it just did utterly nothing for me...
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:04 pm (UTC)
With Silas Marner, I think it was more when I read it than a case of it's actual content. I'm glad I didn't have to read Old Man and the Sea. I tried to read Hemingway a couple of times and his writing style always hangs me up. His Nick Adams short stories are set in an area about 100 miles from where I grew up and when I worked with a library collection focusing on my state, I ended up reading them to understand the connection.

I have only seen bits of the Little Princess mini series but I think that's the one with Nigel Havers. He was my first movie actor crush, sigh...
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cassiopeia7
Sep. 23rd, 2014 09:56 pm (UTC)
I'm with ya on Twilight. For SURE. Not a Dan Brown fan, either. D:

The Vonnegut that hit me the hardest is a short story ("All The King's Horses") rather than a book, so I left it off. Fave Steinbeck is Of Mice and Men, but I ran out of room. (And I love that you included a "children's book," because really, those can be FUN. A good kid's book is wasted on the young.) *hugs Bunnicula*
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galwithglasses
Sep. 23rd, 2014 10:11 pm (UTC)
I had a blast reading Bunnicula to my kid. I love Harold. There are so many kid's books I could have put on the list. Johnny Lion was the one I wanted to check out every time I went to the library when I was about 4. I still want boots like his.
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( 19 comments — Leave a comment )

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