I was born in 1978.
In some places, this makes me a Generation X-er…in others, I’m Generation Y…
Then again, I might be a Millennial, who were born between 1977 and 1995…
Depending on where you look, you can find someone who’ll tell you you’re either X, Y or Millennial.
Does it matter which Generation you are?
And what happened to Z?
As posted on her blog, a library meme.
“Below are the top 106 books tagged “unread” in LibraryThing.
The rules:
Bold what you have read, italicize books you’ve started but couldn’t finish, and strike through books you hated. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list.”
Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell
Anna Karenina
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
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 : a novel
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
Some points about this list –
I have a definite avoidance of girly ‘period’ novels going on: I can’t stand hard-done-by swooning heroines who have to be rescued from their tragic circumstances by the actions of an honourable man!
I quite like Dickens.
I like science fiction / fantasy.
Some of the books I’ve never heard of, so I can’t tell if I want them on my To Be Read list!
I have a terrible, dirty secret. One that will make some librarians gasp in despair, and others maybe will feel relieved that they’re not alone.
You see, I’m not actually a member, or user of public libraries.
There, I said it!
In fact, the only time I’ve been a member of a public library was at Uni, when I joined the local public library…and never used it. As a child, my Mum was a librarian in the local branch, and she just borrowed out books for me on her ticket, so we never got around to getting me a readers ticket. In secondary school, I used the school library, and sometimes the local library, with Mum still borrowing books on my behalf.
Now, as an adult, what I do is go to the local charity shops, buy a pile of whatever books from there that take my fancy at £1 each, read them, then give them back for resale. This means I give to charity twice over, once with the sale to me, and again with the donation back to them to resell. Also, I’ll have an occasional shop at Amazon, buying enough of the £3 paperbacks to get free shipping, reading them, then again, giving them to the charity shops. I very rarely keep any of the books I buy, due to both space issues, and a knowledge that it’ll be many years before I’ve forgotten enough of the contents to be able to read them again without thinking “I know what happens next”.
I don’t have any dependants, my money is entirely my own to spend as I see fit, so I don’t feel that spending £15 to £20 a month or so on books is extortionate, although I realise there could be many people who would think spending that much on books regularly is insane.
As someone who isn’t addicted to a particular author, reads fast but hates deadlines (ie return dates), tends to choose books to pick up based initially on their spine art, and is constantly fighting a book hoarding instinct, is there really any reason for me to use public libraries?
What could persuade me to switch from my buying and sending to charity habit, to joining and using a public library? Purely in relation to books – I’m aware public libraries have a lot more than just books in them, but I have my own computer and internet access, and don’t want to join any sort of groups, so it would have to be the books that would tempt me in.
Am I a bad librarian for not being a member or user of my local library?
Why has this man been allowed to only perform community service after stealing 288 items worth £26,00 from the Catholic Archives in Edinburgh, as blogged before?
The reason for not imposing a custodial sentence? He had already served time for similar thefts in England, so a custodial sentence would be “oppressive”.
Erm…so now a valid defence is “he did it before elsewhere, but he’s very sorry”?
Surely that’s not right?
Dumpling in a Hanky 