The Power of the List

Via Mental Multivitamin, I find one of the list-quiz things that I like so much, but that I haven't done in a while.

Instructions: Review the following list of books. Boldface the books you've read, italicize those you might read, cross out the ones you won’t, put an asterisk * beside the ones on your bookshelves, and place [brackets] around the ones you’ve never even heard of.

* 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) (I've only read the first volume.)
* Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (J. K. Rowling)
The 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 (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 Five (Kurt Vonnegut)
The Secret History (Donna Tartt)
Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C.S. Lewis)
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides)
[Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell)]
Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
[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)
Sula (Toni Morrison)
Cold Mountain (Charles Frazier)
The Alchemist (Paulo Coehlo)
[White Teeth (Zadie Smith)]
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton)

When I strike the books above, indicating that I won't read them, I'm meaning this in the "probably not" sense, not the "I hear that's a crappy book and I want nothing to do with it" sense. Basically, I'm just assuming that with my current interests being what they are, I don't see myself making those books priorities any time soon. All of this may change, however, in the next five years. Maybe I'll revisit this list in 2011, if I'm still blogging.

(And I'm not going to apologize for my intention to read The Da Vinci Code. I love goofy-assed conspiracy theories, especially those involving Jesus and whatnot. Sue me.)