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I have a burning need to know stuff and I love asking awkward questions.

Saturday, July 02, 2022

1001/1292 Books (Part 4) 

Here we are with yet another 20-book excerpt from Hannah’s List of Books to Read BEFORE you Die. As before, these are books I’ve read (so far) from that List. Some are fairly recent reads, like Barbusse and Woolf, whilst others were read by in my teens in the 1970’s - LONG before Blogs were even conceived of. This will be the last of these lists for a while as I have, I think, only 4 left and they're ALL by Jane Austen!! I’ll wait until I have a larger bunch of books to report on and that might take SOME time! [lol] So, here they are:   

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce   

Under Fire – Henri Barbusse 

The Voyage Out – Virginia Woolf 

The Secret Agent – Joseph Conrad 

The Call of the Wild by Jack London 

The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The War of the Worlds – H.G. Wells   

The Invisible Man – H.G. Wells   

Dracula – Bram Stoker   

The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells 

The Time Machine – H.G. Wells   

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson 

Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne 

Journey to the Centre of the Earth – Jules Verne 

A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens 

Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë 

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë 

A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens 

Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley 

A LOT of Classics in this round! I was a HUGE fan of H G Wells in my youth and basically read everything of his I could get my hands on. The same with Conan Doyle and I’ll be revisiting Holmes at some point this year. I *thought* I had all of the Holmes stories but it turned out that I must’ve had some of them from my local library. They’ve since been bought so I can read them at my own pace. MUCH more Dickens to come too! I picked up his complete works a few years ago for a really great knockdown price and have promised myself that I’ll read them all (except for his last unfinished mystery – I mean what’s the point of that, right?) before I die... starting with the shortest ones and getting longer as I go.  

7 comments:

Sarah @ All The Book Blog Names Are Taken said...

I've read waaaaay more of these than in the last round I commented on. Frankenstein is perhaps my fave of these - tied with Dracula of course.

CyberKitten said...

I was quite disappointed with Dracula - being a big vampire fan and all - but I thought Frankenstein was awesome. I think it's very underrated. I need to try out more Shelly @ some point.

Helen said...

I've read quite a lot of these and particularly loved the two Brontë novels and A Tale of Two Cities. I think I've read about half of Dickens' books now - including the unfinished one, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, which is actually very enjoyable, but as frustrating as you would expect!

CyberKitten said...

My friend's girlfriend @ Uni studied English Lit and regularly told me that Dickens was very funny. I had trouble believing her. After reading 'Tale of Two Cities' I was both VERY impressed by the quality of the writing and the fact that he is indeed very funny!

Didn't like 'Wuthering' at all but really liked 'Jane Eyre'. 'Drood' I'll give a miss I think [lol] as I just couldn't stand the idea of *never* knowing whodunnit!!

Sarah @ All The Book Blog Names Are Taken said...

But it's Dracula!

CyberKitten said...

Dracula wasn't a *bad* novel but it was rather slow and I thought the ending very very abrupt and anti-climatic. I liked Mina though...

My review is here: https://cyberkittenspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/just-finished-reading-dracula-by-bram.html

Sarah @ All The Book Blog Names Are Taken said...

I can understand that, especially because of the build-up.