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April 27, 2004

Hoity-Toity Literary Thread

I got this from Red-Headed Ramblings, - it's a list of books you have (or have not read).

Proceed at your own risk. Don't operate heavy equipment.

Books I've read are in bold. Comments are bracketed.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontė, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontė, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard

Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
[Although it's on my short list] Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage

Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment

Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury [I never liked Faulknor]
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust [Auf Deutsch!]
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms

Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World [perhaps the only Libertarian in the world who never did]
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis [Auch auf Deutsch]
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain [Noch eine auf Deutsch - aber ich erinnere gar nichts]
Marquez, Gabriel Garcķa - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar [As if]
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac

Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye [Hated it!]
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich [should be required reading]
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels

Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
[Worth the effort]
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five

Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son
Enh. I need to take a vacation and bring some along. Posted by Mitch at April 27, 2004 11:28 AM
Comments

Jane Eyre should be required reading.

Posted by: red at April 27, 2004 11:32 AM

So I'm told.

Yet another book on the short list.

Posted by: mitch at April 27, 2004 11:38 AM

I actually referenced Ivan Denisovitch in a resignation letter. Really.

Also surprised you don't like Faulkner. Why? FWIW, I have a collection of Faulkner short stories among my engineering books at work.

Posted by: Alfred Fingulin at April 27, 2004 02:22 PM

You'll really need to read Faulkner, push on through, you'll like it when you're done. Like anything else addicting.

didn't see "In Cold Blood" up there. It's a masterpeice of punctuation. Seriously.

Read the Shakespeare

And find a copy of "A Rabble in Arms" by Kenneth Roberts, I don't know if it's a "great book" but it's a great book, I read all of his books when I was a kid over and over, I found "Northwest Passage" in a library book sale this year. Fantastic. Beau Geste, Prisoner of Zenda, Count of Monte Christo, Kidnapped, Sea Wolf, Captain's Courageous. Find a Short Story called Lenigan and the Ants (really!) Who the hell needed Star Wars. (can you tell my oldest is nine years old, he's got lots of reading to do)

Anyway, stay away from Dreiser, don't even see the Monty Clift movie (Day in the Sun, I think) You won't blame him for killing Shelly Winters.

Willa Cather is surprisingly good, Edith Wharton is miserable (just TRY reading the Custom of the Country)

Anyway, read your Faulkner, start with Sanctuary, it's short and dirty but pretty damn funny in places, then do The Hamlet (Faulkner's)The Town and The Mansion and you'll be hooked.

Posted by: Terry at April 29, 2004 01:30 PM

Terry: Actually, the Monty Clift movie is called Place in the Sun. I thought it was rather brilliant. And yes, Shelley Winters was a big whiner.

And In Cold Blood is one of my favorite books of all time.

Posted by: red at April 29, 2004 01:48 PM

Red,

Sorry, but there's no way I can agree with you on that movie. Just talking about it is bringing back flashbacks, I was a HUGE Clash fan, you see. And I had to read the book for school anyway, and obviously Monty was cool, there was that song and everything and OH MY GOD! MAKE IT STOP! KILL THE FAT ONE!

Anyway, in the movie world, Shelly Winters needs to stay off boats.

Posted by: Terry at April 30, 2004 02:49 PM
hi