This is a meme going around Facebook at the moment and, I haven't written a blog post for a while so this is as good as place as any!

For a geek I've done a rather poor job! (I've tagged both mine and Emma's in the one list!)


1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (Emma)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien (Emma)
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte (Emma)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling - read first 3 (Emma)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee (Chuq)
6 The Bible - read parts (Emma)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens (Emma)
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott (Emma)
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - read 7 or 8, seen more on stage. (Emma)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien (Emma)
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (Chuq)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (Emma)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald  (Chuq)
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams (Chuq)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll (Emma)
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (Emma)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis (Emma)
34 Emma - Jane Austen (Emma)
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Emma)
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 (Chuq) (Emma)
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown (Emma)
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery (Emma)
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy.
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (Chuq)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen (Emma)
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth.
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon (Emma)
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck (Chuq)
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (Emma)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens (Emma)
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (Emma)
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
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
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White (Chuq) (Emma)
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton (Emma)
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare (Emma)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl (Chuq) (Emma)
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo


9 out of 100.  How embarrassing!  If you don't count the ones which are (a) children's books or (b) books that were a compulsory part of our high school english curriculum, then the ONLY book on the list would be Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.


What is even worse is that a significant number of the books on the last are sitting right on our bookshelf and have done so for the past 9 years.  Most of them were inherited, not purchased ... I know many of them are classics which is why they are still there!


Some titles on the list do stand out as standard geek fare.. Nineteen Eighty Four, Animal Farm, Brave New World, Catch 22 and The Time Traveller's Wife are titles that I should really familiarise myself with more!


If I scrape the bottom of the barrel ... I've read the book of Contact, and it WAS better than the movie, does that give me cred?  Also there were episodes of Lost named 'The Little Prince' and 'A Tale Of Two Cities' .. there was a lot of CS Lewis references in the show as well.  That has to count for something?


Emma scored 27 on this list, quite a few of which she attributes to owning the complete works of Jane Austen, the whole Harry Potter series, and all of The Lord of the Rings books!  


Quick plug: If you are a bibliophile - check out http://www.librarything.com - fellow geek John Dalton helps to run this one!