Never Put it Down

Note: on a completely different note, is Bin Laden REALLY dead? What do you guys think about this? Will there still be terror? Talk amongst yourselves. 

Now, onto my normal scheduled post. N is for Never.

source

I know I talk about books a lot, but how can you not? They are great. They take you out of your life and into someone else's. How cool is that? I have one problem though. I cannot, and I mean cannot (it pains me) stop reading a book if I start it. Even if the book is pretty darn crappy, I almost always finish it. Even if it takes me weeks. And it sometimes does. I will read a page and put it down and go find something else to do, and then read another the next day (or week). I hate leaving things unfinished. It is an obsession of mine.

However, there have been (over the years) a couple of books I just couldn't finish. Ironically enough, one of these is a classic and was supposed to be really good. They were:

Catch 22 -- War, planes and DULL-city abound. I tried to read it, really I did, but when the guy kept talking about how he couldn't get out of the war, on the hundredth time I read that, I got fed up. And I was living in New Orleans where I had much better things to do than read a book I wasn't even interested in anyway. So I didn't.

Yiddish Policemans Union - By the same author as Kavalier and Clay (which I liked), this book was a letdown for me. This was one that my Mom really liked, so maybe my expectations were too high, but I had a really hard time getting through it. Or NOT through it. It did make me curious about the so called Jewish settlement in Alaska, which was fictional. Other than that, it just didn't catch my attention

So, that's it so far. Do you finish every book you start or do you put it down if you hate it?

Now, another quick sidenote. BBC came out with a list of their top 100 books. Here are the top 20. I have crossed the ones I have read.  

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
3. His Dark Materials, Philip Pullman
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, JK Rowling
6. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
7. Winnie the Pooh, AA Milne
8. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
9. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, CS Lewis
10. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
11. Catch-22, Joseph Heller **oh JOY, speaking of, see ABOVE!!!**
12. Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
13. Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
14. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
15. The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger
16. The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame
17. Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
18. Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
19. Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
20. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

Out of 20, I have read 11. Out of the entire 100, I have read 31.

Which ones have you read?? Please go to the main list and see: out of the 100, how many have you read of those?