So, I am home sick, and am on the verge of ripping my throat out because it's so sore. In order to stave off the madness, I've decided to take the opportunity to catch up on some reading and posting.
So, a few weeks ago (or posts I guess), Odious at Odious and Peculiar posted a list of the 100 Best Novels, bolding the ones he had read. Well, he was appalled at how few of them he has read, something his Kate is relishing as the beginning to a good-old-fashioned-reading contest. I happen to know for a fact that both Kate and Odious are incredibly well-read, so I think I need to take a look at this purported list and see how frightfully short I fall of measuring up to it. Plus, I'm going to the bookstore this weekend (a trip for my Birthday) and it would be great to generate a list of things to keep an eye out for while there, but I really relish just digging in and not looking for anything...more on that later. The bolded, I've read.
1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
2. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
3. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
4. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
5. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
6. Ulysses by James Joyce
7. Beloved by Toni Morrison
8. The Lord of the Flies by William Golding
9. 1984 by George Orwell
10. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
11. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
12. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
13. Charlotte's Web by E. B. White
14. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
15. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
16. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
17. Animal Farm by George Orwell
18. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
19. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
20. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
21. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
22. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne
23. Their Eyes are Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
25. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison
26. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
27. Native Son by Richard Wright
28. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
29. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
30. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
31. On the Road by Jack Kerouac
32. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
33. The Call of the Wild by Jack London
34. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
35. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
36. Go Tell it on the Mountain by James Baldwin
37. The World According to Garp by John Irving
38. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
39. A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
40. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien
41. Schindler's List by Thomas Keneally
42. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
43. The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
44. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
45. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
46. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
47. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
48. Lady Chatterley's Lover by D. H. Lawrence
49. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
50. The Awakening by Kate Chopin
51. My Antonia by Willa Cather
52. Howards End by E. M. Forster
53. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
54. Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
55. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
56. Jazz by Toni Morrison
57. Sophie's Choice by William Styron
58. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
59. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster
60. Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
61. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor
62. Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
63. Orlando by Virginia Woolf
64. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence
65. Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe
66. Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
67. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
68. Light in August by William Faulkner
69. The Wings of the Dove by Henry James
70. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
71. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
72. A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
73. Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
75. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
76. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
77. In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway
78. The Autobiography of Alice B. Tokias by Gertrude Stein
79. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
80. The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
81. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
82. White Noise by Don DeLillo
83. O Pioneers! by Willa Cather
84. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
85. The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells
86. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
87. The Bostonians by Henry James
88. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
89. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather
90. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame
91. This Side of Paradise by F. Scott Fitzgerald
92. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
93. The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles
94. Babbitt by Sinclair Lewis
95. Kim by Rudyard Kipling
96. The Beautiful and the Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
97. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
98. Where Angels Fear to Tread by E. M. Forster
99. Main Street by Sinclair Lewis
100. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
So, I am appalled by how much Faulkner I've read when, forgive me, I find him boring, and how little E.M. Forester, Woolf, and Fitzgerald I've read when I find all them incredibly engaging.
Also, there are a few that I think I may have read, but my sickness haze is clouding my memory. I think I may have read Lord Jim, Tropic of Cancer, and a couple of others, but, since I can't say for sure, it wouldn't be right to bold them.
Oh, and I am dismayed at how few I've read.
8 comments:
As I commanded Odious, read Brideshead Revisited and Sophie's Choice tout de suite!
Yes Faulkner's always kicked my butt all over the place. I tried to read Absalom, Absalom and suffered a humiliating defeat and read until maybe the last 50 pages of Light in August--the only thing I remember about that one was that the main guy's name was Joe Christmas.
And don't be dismayed at how few you rhave read. You were too busy reading the excellent books written before 1923. or you were painting your toenails while watching the Bachelor reruns. No shame in that!
oops--stop everything and read the Grapes of Wrath at once!
Wow. That was prompt. You certainly don't think the same of it as a reviewer did earlier this month: "While the story did have a great moral to go along with it, it was about dirt! Dirt and migrating. Dirt and migrating and more dirt."
:) I will read it.
I agree with larissa about Sophie's Choice. I carried that book around in my head for weeks after I read it. To me, that is the mark of a good book.
I would add Atlas Shrugged, but only if you have a burning desire to discover who is John Galt.
Sorry you're not feeling well. Hope your little germs go away soon.
Thank you for the nod. I hope to improve soon as well since I absolutely have to go back to work tomorrow.
What is Sophie's choice about?
I am definitely going to read Ayn Rand. I loved the Fountainhead.
Sophie's Choice, in a nutshell, is about a Holocaust survivor & her friendship with a writer and a depressed genius. The movie, although entertaining, doesn't do the book justice. Isn't that always the case.
Yes, absolutely. Although I have to admit that I am looking forward to seeing Pride and Prejudice, Harry Potter IV, and the Chronicles of Narnia on the silverscreen nonetheless.
Absolutely. There's nothing wrong with watching the movie, but it's never a substitute for reading the book. I'm all for the movie as an adjunct to the book.
Post a Comment