Web site progress and that book meme

[hrj]

Today was "work on the web site" day at scotica's place. First off, I successfully reinstalled Dreamweaver on the laptop in such a way that it doesn't crash every time I open it. Then I successfully identified how to fix the bracketing error in the php code for the surviving garments search page. Yay me. (The fix is a bit clumsy, but it's invisible to the user so that doesn't matter.) It doesn't seem like a big accomplishment, but it's the momentum that counts. Now I need to get back to some fluency with php and start working on the Welsh names pages and database search.

I decided that the "books on this list that I've read" meme needs a few additional nuances, so in addition to "bold books you've read, italicize ones you started" I'm adding "put a + after books in your queue". So italics and a + means I've started it and intend to finish reading it (whereas plain italics means I gave up) and plain text with a + means the book is sitting on my "to be read" shelf. Moreover, an underline means I've seen it in dramatic form (movie, tv, etc.) whether or not I've read it. And strikethrough means I'd never heard of the book before I saw it on this list.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte  (I think I've read this -- possibly not, though.)
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman  + (hard to code as I've read the first two, have the third on the "to read" shelf, and only the first has come out in film so far)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare +
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulk
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams  (seen part of the tv version, never finished)
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carrol
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis (Redundant w/ #33!)
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
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown Terrible, terrible book.
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
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
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
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas + (I'm counting this because I have it cued up on my iPhone audiobooks)
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
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath  (I think we were assigned this in Jr. High, but I'm not absolutely positive.)
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt  (I got about halfway through the book and just gave up.  When I saw the movie, I concluded I hadn't missed much.)
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
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
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery  (I confess the recent operatic version of this was not particularly impressive)
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 (see #14)
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
 

Comments

[green-knight.livejournal.com]

I think it's a bit idiotic to have 'the complete works of Shakespeare' and 'the Bible' on the same list as 'The Little Prince' - only a total nerd would read all of them. The complete works of [any prolific writer] are probably beyond most people.

It's a very strange list anyway.

[hrj.livejournal.com]

Well, yes -- even more ridiculous is that it includes two multi-volume series and then one of the individual volumes from each as a separate item. It also hovers on the edge between "telling my readers something interesting about me" and "bragging". And as said in an article that scotica found about the meme, the specific (evidently false) framing story about "most people have only read six of these" enables the vast majority of meme-doers to feel superior to those unnamed "most people". The psychology behind memes is always more interesting than their content, in my opinion.

[cryptocosm.livejournal.com]

What I find amusing is the mishmash of true classics, comparatively modern semi-classics, recent bestsellers and/or critical favorites, and inspirations for popular movies. Where is the justification for supposing that having read this particular list is more worthwhile than some other arbitrary 100 titles?