Apparently I've been....tagged?

I don't get many comments on my site (honestly, I'm not complaining as I'm pretty antisocial anyway and don't really know how to respond to people commenting on what I say) but I was caught by surprise this morning by a comment that said only: TAG! After cautiously exploring the link attached to the word, I found I had been tagged in a game called 'meme tag' by BikeMonkey....well, that actually didn't clarify anything for me. So, after some googling, I found a blog that explained the rules of meme tag. General Disarray, who had been following my befuddlement (worried that I had been cyper-punked by some female scientist hating stalker, I assume), snorted and said "It's a chain letter".

I hate chain letters. I was always the kid in school who hated the social obligation pressure of "not breaking the chain" and so would, of course, break the chain. (I was - perhaps not surprisingly - not very popular as a kid). So here's my dilemma - my innate personality against my true enjoyment of the people in the blogosphere and therefore my desire not to be rude and make people mad... therefore here's my compromise: I have played the game but I have not tagged anyone - therefore I am both playing AND breaking the chain. (Crap, I'm going to get chased around the playground again by an angry mob, aren't I?). However, I invite my seven readers (whoever you are) to play if you wish. Here are the rules (plus the rules for meme tag if, like me, you are new to this concept):

a) rules for this particular game of tag: On your own blog, take the list of books below and highlight in bold anything you read completely. Put in italics anything you started but didn't finish. Leave in normal font, anything you have not read.

b) rules of meme tag in general: at the end of the blog where you have done the above, you should list 6 people who you "tag" and are supposed to do this particular activity on their blog. Go to their blog and leave a comment letting them know they've been tagged.

c) While not in the rules on the blog I read, I think you are probably supposed to also include a link to the blog that "tagged" you so people can trace it back to the hypothetical originator.

Okay here we go (along with some comments from me....)

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen (went through a phase where I was all about all things Austen. I think I was fascinated by what happens when people actually follow social norms...)
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien 3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible (I really tried to read it from cover to cover but got hung up on all the begats)
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman (and they are indeed pretty dark for "children's" books, interesting though)
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller (one of the best books ever and I'm convinced that it's the inspiration for much of university policy)
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (yes, I honestly read all of them and I did it in the 7-12 grades....afterall, it was better than being chased around the playground by the angry mob!)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (my last attempt at doing what all the girls were doing....they loved it and wanted to be Scarlett, I thought Scarlett was a whore. That's when I switched to Shakespeare).
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy (yes, I really did read the whole thing. It was great, but I had spent so much time with those characters that I felt like I was losing some of my closest friends when I finished the book)
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame (when my life is not Alice in Wonderland, it's Mr. Toad's wild ride, that's all I'm going to say)
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding (shudder, a little too close to home)
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (I'm still confused....)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo