The Book Meme

[jducoeur]

Lifted from chaiya. This is a more interesting list than most such memes: College Board's 101 Greatest Works of Literature -- bold those you have read, underline those you want to read.

Beowulf (Read in translation, seen in performance, read in rather good comic adaptation and messed around in the original)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
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 (Delightfully odd -- a favorite)
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights (Only seen in movie form)
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (Truth to tell, I'm not sure I've read all of it -- I've read various parts at various times. I love to say the Tales -- they feel delightful in the mouth)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard (Seen on stage, anyway)
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (Ick. Had to read it for school, and despised it.)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (One of my all-time favorite books. I have something like five different translations, although I confess a deep fondness for the Ciardi.)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe (Read for school a zillion years ago. Made surprisingly little impression.)
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (Also read for school. I wasn't ready to be interested by it.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (Also read for school, and I was prepared to hate it, but I got totally drawn in. Good stuff.)
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers (I think I've read this, but I have to admit I'm not certain -- I've seen and read so many adaptations it's honestly hard to be sure.)
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
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 (Need to reread this -- I was too young to really appreciate it the first time.)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms (Hated it. I just don't like Hemingway's writing style.)
Homer - The Iliad (In English translation, natch.)
Homer - The Odyssey (Ditto)
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (Good, although I'm disappointed that they omit 1984, which remains my favorite dystopic novel.)
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House (Went through a major Ibsen phase my senior year of high school, and read a bunch of his stuff.)
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 (I really need to read more Kafka.)
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt (Oddly, I don't think I ever read this, although It Can't Happen Here is one of my favorite cautionary novels, as relevant today as when he wrote it.)
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (Way, way too dull for high school. I have successfully forgotten whether I really finished it or not.)
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find (Name doesn't ring a bell, although I read a fair amount of O'Connor in high school.)
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (Like I said, I liked 1984 more. But Animal Farm is also brilliant.)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac (Again, I *think* I've read the original, but a haze of adaptations obscures my memory.)
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet (I read the entire Shakespeare corpus of plays the summer after 10th grade. Not nearly as satisfying as watching the plays, though -- I've seen almost all of them, and they're just plain better performed.)
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (I love Shaw.)
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (Need to reread this in light of alexx_kay's revisionist interpretation.)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone (I went through a major Greek-tragedy kick in high school, and read all the major ones.)
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 (Another one to reread.)
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 (And another to reread, now that I'm old enough to understand it.)
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - George Bergeron
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Slightly disturbing that I read most of these in high school. My tastes have become remarkably period-focused since then...

Comments

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

WHAT!!!!!

NO TOLKIEN!

They put GRAPES OF SUCKING WRATH on here and NO TOLKIEN!????

The apocalypse has arrived!

[metageek.livejournal.com]

It's not too surprising: LOTR isn't really a novel in the normal sense; it's a myth. There's no character development; instead, we get static characters who just act out the consequences of their natures. (The one exception might be Frodo; but even there I'm not sure. He seems different at the end than at the beginning; but I think it's more that he's discovered his true nature than that his nature has changed.) The Bad Guys aren't even characters at all; they're just props. We never even see Sauron. We get a bit of characterization for Saruman, because he changes sides; but, IIRC, he never speaks again after locking up Gandalf.

Moreover, we never get any real sense that the Good Guys might lose. There's no "middle act", no crushing defeat that they have to recover from; they just go from victory to victory. All this is normal in a myth, which is what Tolkein set out to write; but it's not going to please the literature geeks of the College Board.

I mean, their prejudices show through pretty strongly: they've got Emerson and Thoreau and Whitman, but no Frost.

[ladyariadne.livejournal.com]

My first thought was bomb the damn college literary board cause they shouldnt be telling people what to read then to begin with... they have NO taste

Myth or not, it is one of the best written stories I have ever read and have thought that since I was a youngster and it WASNT cool to be a Tolkien geek.

What Vonnegut!?

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - George Bergeron

Oh, it's a short story. That's how I missed it. I dunno if short stories really should be here. I mean Moby Dick is a marathon, while Bartleby is a light sprint.

I've read most of the selections by American/British authors (by product of being an English major) though none by the Russians (product of my college) I strongly recommend Gatsby. You'll enjoy the setting, if not the plot. The film with Redford is pretty good, too. The opening montage is worth seeing again after you see the film.

"A Good Man is Hard to Find" is a twisted short story about a family on an picnic outting who run into a fundamentalist serial killer. It concludes with a confrontation between the grandmother in the family and the killer. Does that ring a bell? I have a great essay where Flannary discusses this story and the writing process...

Re: What Vonnegut!?

[chaiya.livejournal.com]

Re "A Good Man" - if that's it, I've read the entire thing. I just assumed it was a chapter from the larger work or something, since I had to read it for my fiction class a while back. It was so short! But scary!

Justin, why do you NOT want to read Tess? It's one of my all-time favorite books! So tragic! So passionate! So FULL! How could you not want to get sucked in?

Re: What Vonnegut!?

[jducoeur]

Well, it's nothing personal to that book -- I just focused on the ones that are specifically on my mental "mean to read sometime" list. My reading time is sufficiently constrained that realistically, I'm not going to get to many of this list any time soon. And there are a lot of good books on that list that I haven't read...