Confessions of a Would-be English Major

I received this meme from my friend Shadow the other day...

Here are the current top 50 books from What Should I Read Next?.
Bold the books you have read. Italicise the books you might read. Cross out the books you probably won't read, and pass it on.

The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy - Douglas Adams
The Great Gatsby - F.Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince (Harry Potter 6) - J.K. Rowling
Life of Pi - Yann Martel
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story - George Orwell
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (book 3) - J.K. Rowling
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
Angels and Demons - Dan Brown
Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
Neuromancer - William Gibson
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Ender's Game (The Ender Saga) - Orson Scott Card
Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Good Omens - Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman
Atonement - Ian McEwan
The Shadow Of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Dune - Frank Herbert

*sigh* I wish I'd received this meme about a week ago, because now I'm looking at all of these books I'd like to read knowing that it will be a while before I get to them. I splurged the other night at Joseph-Beth and bought The Well of Lost Plots and Something Rotten (both by Jasper Fforde) and Neil Gaiman's Anansi Boys. (I've also had Jasper Fforde's The Big Over Easy and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim by David Sedaris on audiobook on my iPod for months, but I haven't had the opportunity to listen to them.)
I'll admit it - a lot of the books that I marked as "might read" are books that I probably should have read by this point in my life (how is it that I've never read any Jane Austen or any of the Brontë sisters?) or are books that my friends have recommended to me. For instance, I have no idea if Cryptonomicon is my kind of book, but fatoudust and nasturtium both read it and enjoyed it. It's book peer pressure!

I made a conscious effort to not cross anything out. I looked up the books that I was not familiar with on Amazon. There was nothing on the list that sounded particularly horrid; anything that elicited a "meh" just got left alone.

And just because I actually marked a book as "have read" is no indication of whether I liked it or not. I'm looking at you, Mr. Hemingway. You too, Mr. Fitzgerald. I hated you both and neither of you would be in bold print if it wasn't for high school literature assignments. (Actually, there are several books on this list that I was forced to read. 4 out of 7 books from my senior British literature class are listed... but I enjoyed all of those.)

I marked The Lord of the Rings as a "might read" since I've only read The Fellowship of the Ring. Yeah, that's right. I never completed the series. And I didn't buy the extended editions of the movies, either.

And then there's The Life of Pi. At one point, I was interested in reading this. One of my coworkers raved about it. Since that point, I've heard from other people that it was the most excruciating read they'd attempted in a long time. (One person suggested reading every other sentence to lessen the pain but still manage to finish the book.) I'll put it on my "to read" list... somewhere after White Oleander. Yeah, that sounds like a plan.

I'm not sure why I want to read The Da Vinci Code. Just to see what all the fuss is about, I suppose. (And of course, if I read it and think it stinks, I'll probably be much less likely to read Angels and Demons.)

I'm not sure what this list says about me. I guess it does make me feel a little better about my reading habits. Sometimes I have a tendency to think of myself as not that well-read because I'm reading fluff and watching crappy TV while my friends are reading and discussing Finnegan's Wake at great length. But I'ver read almost half of the books on this list, and have several of them on my "will read sooner or later" list. That's gotta count for something, right?