Ganked from Pharyngula.
- Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
- Anna Karenina
- Crime and Punishment
- Catch-22
- One Hundred Years of Solitude (Stone me if you must.)
- Wuthering Heights
- The Silmarillion
- Life of Pi: a novel (An odd book to become a bestseller.)
- The Name of the Rose
- Don Quixote (I took introductory Japanese instead of reading this. Chotto matte kudasai; I'll get to it.)
- Moby Dick
- Ulysses
- Madame Bovary (I was talking about this one just the other night. Death by arsenic is apparently no fun.)
- The Odyssey
- Pride and Prejudice
- Jane Eyre
- The Tale of Two Cities
- The Brothers Karamazov
- Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
- War and Peace
- Vanity Fair
- The Time Traveler's Wife
- The Iliad (Endless futzing about. Fight the war, ice your tragic heroes, and go home already.)
- Emma
- The Blind Assassin
- The Kite Runner
- Mrs. Dalloway
- Great Expectations
- American Gods ("Hey, you...Thought, Memory, whichever one you are: say 'nevermore.'")
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
- Atlas Shrugged (At a certain point in late adolescence, most of us take either Hermann Hesse or Ayn Rand very seriously. I went with Hesse.)
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
- Memoirs of a Geisha
- Middlesex
- Quicksilver (Ten pages in I developed a debilitating attack of the eye-rolls.)
- Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
- The Canterbury Tales
- The Historian: a novel
- 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 (Assigned as a high school penalty when I trespassed by reading two books in as many nights and was a smart-ass about it.)
- The Count of Monte Cristo
- Dracula
- A Clockwork Orange
- Anansi Boys
- The Once and Future King ("He'm verminous, but he'm honest." Aw.)
- The Grapes of Wrath
- The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
- 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 (One Hardy novel per lifetime is more than enough.)
- 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: a memoir
- The God of Small Things (Not the same as Small Gods.)
- A People's History of the United States: 1492-present
- Cryptonomicon ("Bobby Shaftoe's gone to sea/ Silver buckles on his knee/ He'll come back and marry me/ Bonny Bobby Shaftoe." The rest of us will plan tourist visits to Bletchley Park.)
- Neverwhere
- A Confederacy of Dunces (People who like this book often hate the books I enjoy, so it's a useful litmus test.)
- A Short History of Nearly Everything
- Dubliners
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Hee.)
- 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 ("You must not imagine that I am the sort of person who reads novels.")
- The Catcher in the Rye
- On the Road
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame
- Freakonomics: a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
- Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an inquiry into values
- The Aeneid
- Watership Down
- Gravity's Rainbow
- The Hobbit (Do not try to read this for the first time as an adult unless it is your fondest wish to die from cringe.)
- In Cold Blood: a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
- White Teeth
- Treasure Island
- David Copperfield ("Donkeys, Janet!" Fantastic.)
- The Three Musketeers ("Athos is a mountain." Also hee.)
2 comments:
I loved _A Confederacy of Dunces_, so I think there's hope for you and this book.
ACoD makes my teeth itch. After the Hardy debacle, I'm in a "life's too short" mode and plan to read only things I want for a while. Next up: Chekhov short stories!
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