[Meme] book list

[edenfalling]

Taken from annearchy



Any that I've read are in bold. Notes are in italics.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart (I keep meaning to read this, and never quite getting around to it.)
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 (I still can't figure out if this is utter tripe or a work of genius. I'm fairly sure it's one or the other, but which???)
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I read "My Antonia" in high school though; does that count? *grin*)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Divine Comedy
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (This is my favorite of his books.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment ("The Brothers Karamazov" is a hundred times better, FYI.)
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 (Go Unitarians!)
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
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 (I read both parts I and II, and some bits in German as well as the English translation. It's an interesting mix of genius and utter blather.)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies (I read it when I was quite young, and have repressed almost all memory of the story.)
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22 (Well, I read about half of it; then it got too depressing and I couldn't continue.)
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (I read it for school. It was boring as hell.)
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey (It was Fitzgerald's translation, I believe.)
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (A very cool book, though I still have no idea what the point of the Spanish nunnery chapters was.)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God (The first story I ever finished writing was an assignment "thematically inspired" by this book.)
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (This is another book I read young and repressed, until I had to read it again in high school.)
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 (Funny story: my friend's dad started to read this in the original once, trying to practice his German. On the first page, the main character wakes up as a giant cockroach. Mr. Gepford concluded that his German was obviously not as good as he'd thought it was, and gave up, not realizing that that really is what happens. Ah, Kafka, how we shake our heads at your psychoses.)
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt (We had a choice of "Babbitt" or "Main Street." I finished the one that bored me less by page 50. Note carefully how that is not actually a recommendation of this book.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild (A childhood and perennial favorite, this one!)
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener (We drove our English teacher mad for a month afterward: "Elizabeth, you have to turn in your outline tomorrow." "I prefer not to.")
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved (I read "Song of Solomon" instead, which I quite liked.)
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Orwell, George - Nineteen Eighty-Four (Yet again a book I read early and repressed until high school. The appendix on the destruction of free thought via the removal of words is, I think, the creepiest part.)
Orwell, George - A Homage to Catalonia
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (God I love Poe.)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front (Like "Faust," I've read this both in English and the original German. It's a really good translation, just so you know.)
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (I hate this book with the passion of a thousand fiery suns. I do respect it on a technical level -- it's an astonishingly good job of characterization -- which may be why I hate it so much; I came away from it with a burning desire to smack Holden Caulfield until he sucked it up and got on with his stupid little life.)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet (Overrated, and Hamlet's another eminently smackable character.)
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth (I've never seen this one staged properly, which is a damned shame.)
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (Well, I've read pieces of it...)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
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
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Harrison Bergeron (This isn't a book; it's a short story from Welcome to the Monkey House! What gives?)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (I dislike Walt Whitman too, though not nearly as much as "Catcher In the Rye." He had a few good pieces, I suppose.)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (Damn creepy, this one.)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son (As with Sinclair Lewis's work, we were given a choice; I read "Black Boy" instead. It's quite good.)

Hmm. I feel I ought to be posting fics, but what I've been doing lately is working in small pieces on a number of longer stories. Ah well.