Friday, October 5, 2007

Succumb to the meme

Bolding those you've read, italicizing those you've read a bit of, leaving the rest alone. I put comments in parens, because fish gotta swim and I gotta natter.
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:

Unknown said...

I loved _A Confederacy of Dunces_, so I think there's hope for you and this book.

3pennyjane said...

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!