Reading List Meme

i'm not normally high on memes. This one, though, piqued my interest (found here). So here you are, a random list of books (compiled by who knows who) showing which ones i have read or started. Sadly, the ones i have read are a very small subset. i don't currently have any on my reading list because i tend to keep a very short reading list. i'm open to your input though: which of the books am i absolutely missing out on? Here are the rules.

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

• Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
• Crime and Punishment
• Catch-22
• One Hundred Years of Solitude
• Wuthering Heights
• The Silmarillion
• Life of Pi: A Novel
• The Name of the Rose
• Don Quixote
• Moby Dick
• Ulysses
• Madame Bovary
• The Odyssey
• Pride and Prejudice
• Jane Eyre
• A Tale of Two Cities
• The Brothers Karamazov (currently reading for a second time)
• Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
• War and Peace
• Vanity Fair
• The Time Traveller’s Wife
• The Iliad
• Emma
• The Blind Assassin
• The Kite Runner
• Mrs. Dalloway
• Great Expectations
• American Gods
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
• Atlas Shrugged
• Reading Lolita in Tehran
• Memoirs of a Geisha
• Middlesex
• Quicksilver
• Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
• The Canterbury Tales
• The Historian
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
• Love in the Time of Cholera
• Brave New World
• The Fountainhead
• Foucault’s Pendulum
• Middlemarch
• Frankenstein
• The Count of Monte Cristo
• Dracula
• A Clockwork Orange
• Anansi Boys
• The Once and Future King
• The Grapes of Wrath
• The Poisonwood Bible
• 1984
• Angels & Demons
• The Inferno
• The Satanic Verses
• Sense and Sensibility
• The Picture of Dorian Gray
• Mansfield Park
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• To the Lighthouse
• Tess of the D’Urbervilles
• Oliver Twist
• Gulliver’s Travels
• Les Misérables
• The Corrections
• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
• Dune*
• The Prince
• The Sound and the Fury
• Angela’s Ashes
• The God of Small Things
• A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
• Cryptonomicon
• Neverwhere
• A Confederacy of Dunces
• A Short History of Nearly Everything
• Dubliners
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being
• Beloved
• Slaughterhouse-Five
• The Scarlet Letter
• Eats, Shoots & Leaves
• The Mists of Avalon
• Oryx and Crake
• Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
• Cloud Atlas
• The Confusion
• Lolita
• Persuasion
• Northanger Abbey
• The Catcher in the Rye
• On the Road
• The Hunchback of Notre Dame
• Freakonomics
• Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
• The Aeneid
• Watership Down
• Gravity’s Rainbow
• The Hobbit*
• In Cold Blood
• White Teeth
• Treasure Island
• David Copperfield
• The Three Musketeers

Kindle

i like to read. Actually, i love to read. i grew up with a book in my hand (literally - my mom made me to put the book down when i was in the car because i couldn't get home from a mile away. i was 13). i can still sit down with a good book and not look up for multiple hours.

i think it was last year that Sony introduced the Sony Reader, a digital device utilizing e-ink. That means that the display is much more readable than a regular computer screen and doesn't fatigue your eyes. It sounded pretty cool, but was a bit expensive and used a proprietary format for the books that you bought. Plus, it was a first-generation product, and i'm not an early adopter. i like to know what is out there, but i'd rather wait a few generations for a product that has been developed with some real-world feedback.

Well, Amazon just released the Kindle, a similar product with more features and such. You can check out the link if you want specifics, but the things that jumped out at me were that it is wifi enabled (it will also log on to phone networks as well, at no charge), has some internet connectivity (wikipedia, certain newspapers and blogs) and has a keyboard for annotation and full-text search.

It looks really cool, but again, it's a bit out of my price range. Plus, the books you buy for it aren't that much cheaper than buying the physical books. Since i am in a city with one of the best bookstores in the world and can find plenty of used books to read for significantly cheaper than the new price, i'm not sure how many books i would be willing to buy in electronic format. There are a lot of public domain books that i could read for free, but i like some of the newer books as well.

So i guess i'll wait another generation or so, to see if prices come down and functionality gets better. Hopefully, there are enough early adopters to push the development of the devices. The good news is that the Kindle is currently back-ordered, so at least there should be some good feedback. Here's hoping...