Books I've finished are italicized. Books I started and then put down because life is too motherfucking short are struck-out. Books I myself mean to read are bolded.
* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina
* Crime and Punishment
* Catch-22
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion
* Life of Pi
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote
. Maybe. Cannot remember. I saw Man of La Mancha in dinner theater, though, and I'm pretty sure that counts. "To dream... the imposs... ible dreammm!"* Moby-Dick
* Ulysses
. I haven't read it, although Cousin A Prime thinks I would like it. One of these days I'll tune in for Bloomsday, when leading lights read it on the radio. I think it's on WBAI.* Madame Bovary
. It's something about gloves, right? Or was that Mary Todd Lincoln?* The Odyssey
. In GREEK, motherfuckers!* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre
* A Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov
. No, I haven't read it, although I've seen The Flying Karamazov Brothers juggle a bowling ball, a chainsaw, and a squid, all the while making jokes about socialism, so, again, I think we should count that.* Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
* War and Peace
* Vanity Fair
. I swear half this list is titles people remember from playing Authors.* The Time Traveler's Wife
. No, I ain't read it. But somebody gave me a copy... if anyone wants one.* The Iliad
. ALSO in Greek, bitches.* Emma
* The Blind Assassin. Love Margaret Atwood, except that one about the woman who had an abortion and consequently thought she was a bear. So maybe I'll read this.
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations
* American Gods: A Novel
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
* Atlas Shrugged
. Lori agrees with me that this book is a piece of shit, but I am semi-engaged in a war of words with a commenter over my characterization of The Fountainhead as "pretty close to evil," so I will decline to disparage this one. Er, any more than I just have. Fuck it. Your Neighborhood Librarian shrugged.* Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
* Memoirs of a Geisha: A Novel
* Middlesex: A Novel
* Quicksilver
. Love the crap out of Neal Stephenson, from Zodiac
through Snow Crash
, but the Baroque Cycle just wasn't snappy enough for me.* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West. Good politics, but the same cannot be said for his most recent book, What-the-Dickens: The Story of a Rogue Tooth Fairy
, reviewed over on Pink Me. Awful.* The Canterbury Tales
* The Historian
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera
* Brave New world
* The Fountainhead
. Gave me the creeps but Christina Ricci totally recommends it.
* Middlemarch
* Frankenstein
* The Count of Monte Cristo
* Dracula
* A Clockwork Orange
. And everything else Anthony Burgess wrote.* Anansi Boys
. This list sure is loaded up with Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson, isn't it? You can tell that it's culled from the libraries of online social networkers.* The Once and Future King
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel
* Nineteen Eighty-Four
* Angels & Demons
. GOD. I forced myself to listen to The DaVinci Code just so I could help patrons who wanted something just like it. I decided that I'd rather force the citizenry to read Marina Warner
than force myself to read anything else by Dan Brown.* The Inferno
. I'm assuming this refers to the Divine Comedy, and in that case, I'd say I've probably read it. I must have, right?* The Satanic Verses: A Novel
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray
* Mansfield Park
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
* To the Lighthouse
. I was going to say the only Virginia Woolf I've ever read was Orlando
, and that about 10 times, but I think we had to read To The Lighthouse in my one and only college English class. I AP'ed out of English, and it wasn't until I needed a stray 6 credits to graduate that I opted for a class called "From Beowulf to Virginia Woolf". It was summer. It was reading.* Tess of the D'Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist
. And I was in the musical at the St. Mark's CYO. "Never before has a boy wanted more."* Gulliver's Travels
* Les Miserables
* The Corrections
. Got a copy of this one laying around too.* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Here you go. THIS book I actually intend to read.
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury
. Never have read any Faulkner. Kind of strange, because I like a) Southern fiction, b) alcohol, and c) strong titles.* Angela's Ashes
* The God of Small Things
* People's History of the United States: 1492 to Present
. The graphic novel version (A People's History of American Empire
) is sitting on my bed right this minute.* Cryptonomicon
. SO good.* Neverwhere: A Novel
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A Novel
* Beloved
. I am going to get this on audio one of these days.* Slaughterhouse-Five
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel. On audio, read by Campbell Scott. Oooooh.
* Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
. See above RE: Guns, Germs & Steel.* Cloud Atlas: A Novel
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey
* The Catcher in the Rye
* On the Road. I always smile when a young person comes in looking for this book. I love the thought of reading it for the first time.
* 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
. But god, it was laying on my college boyfriend's desk the entire time we lived together.* The Aeneid
. In English. Uh, pals. My Latin always sucked.* Watership Down: A Novel
* Gravity's Rainbow
. No, but Bob read it, and that should count. I read The Crying of Lot 49
, and I loved it, but I never could get through anything else Pynchon wrote. Hm. Although it looks like there may be a graphic novel version of Gravity's Rainbow
, with Frank Miller on board. I could read that.* The Hobbit. My dad had a nice slipcased edition of this book, with the runes all around the title and the maps on the endpapers. I figured out how to read the runes, and for a while I wrote in my diary in those runes. Prefigured the punishing Greek translations I had to do for my undergrad Classics major by, oh, ten, twelve years.
* In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
* White Teeth: A Novel
* Treasure Island. Listening to it on audio right now! Alfred Molina reads it, and his amazingly various pirate voices make me think that Gore Verbinsky could have saved a lotta money, just hired Molina to play Barbossa AND Davy Jones AND Bootstrap Bill AND possibly even Chow-Yun Fat. Gonna review it soon on Pink Me.
* David Copperfield
* The Three Musketeers
Unlike Lori, I did NOT take a Jane Austen class, ever ever ever. And I have never seen what people see in her. I can't even remember which ones I've started. I tried one a few years ago again. There was a carriage ride, and a ha-ha, and it was really important who rode in which carriage, and I just could not deal. In fact, I briefly considered naming this blog The Librarian Who Doesn't Like Jane Austen - I figured I would be the only one who fit that description.
Just not a classic literature type, really. All the classics on this list that I've read I read as a really young girl - like 8 or 9. After I finished all the Judy Blumes and Nancy Drews, I started in on my parents' bookshelves. Many other books that I read at the time for some reason DON'T make this list: Fear of Flying
, for example. Tropic of Capricorn
. The Complete Saki
.It's no wonder, is it.
