Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Up My Alley

The instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Meme via Jay. I can't figure out how to underline either, so I asterisked the school ones.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
*Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (actually, I may have eventually finished this, but only after so many stops and starts that I really can't remember)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
*Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre

*A Tale of Two Cities

The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
*Mrs. Dalloway
*Great Expectations

American Gods
(I think it's fascinating there are three Neil Gaiman books on this list, given that he's a contemporary genre [fantasy/sf] writer. I haven't read Anansi Boys, but I love American Gods and Neverwhere.)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex

Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West (but I have read the Geoffrey Maguire retellings of Cinderella and Snow White)
*The Canterbury Tales (I was only assigned some of the tales!)
The Historian : a Novel (I hated this book a lot.)
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
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray

Mansfield Park
(my favorite Austen)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist

*Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

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
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
*Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-5
*The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey

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
In Cold Blood : a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences (I picked a pristine, with-dust jacket copy of this out of the mixed-paper recycling dumpster a few months ago, but I can't pull the trigger and read it. I love Capote, but I'm not big on murder or, frankly, true stories)
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

I'm surprised In Search of Lost Time/Swann's Way isn't on the list. I would have thought that's the most started, least finished book of all time. I keep getting stuck around page 80, and at least two people have told me they bogged down in the same place.

2 comments:

Jay said...

I finished Swann's Way, unassigned, when I was about 14. That was just the age when I was deeply impressed with myself for reading such books. I remember what the cover of the book looked like, and nothing else.

And clearly I need to start reading Neil Gaiman.

C-Belle said...

LOVE this. Am working on it now.