Monday, January 30, 2006

World through the eyes of a child

Here's the one I was planning to post yesterday... it didn't get as hopelessly lost in cyberspace as I thought it did!

So. Every year I say that I'm going to work on being better-read, especially in the classics, and I think I've found a list (which, by the way, I found here) that I'm going to work on for this year. It's a good one--it encompasses both current and classic literature, and should be a pretty good all-around overview of books that every well-read person should have covered.

It occurs to me here that I've definitely got my work cut out for me. Anyone want to join me? Kim? Lindsey? Anyone? I also need to find a list of classic movies that are "must sees" for anyone who wants to be well-versed in more than just the blockbusters. So, if you find such a list, send it my way. I'm going to link this list over on the side menu and update it throughout the year; let's see how far I can get on this thing.

Classics

  • The Razor's Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
  • A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
  • Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
  • Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
  • Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
  • Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
  • The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
  • David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
  • The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
  • Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
  • Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia De Burgos by Julia De Burgos
  • The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
  • Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
  • The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
  • Night by Elie Wiesel
  • The Code of the Woosters by P. G. Wodehouse
  • Hamlet by William Shakespeare
  • Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
  • Beloved by Toni Morrison
  • A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
  • A Separate Peace by John Knowles
  • Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
  • The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
  • The Awakening by Kate Chopin
  • Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
  • Time and Again by Jack Finney
  • Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
  • The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
  • Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
  • Sybil by Flora Schreiber
  • Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
  • Cousin Bette by Honore De Balzac
  • Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
  • Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
  • The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
  • The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
  • Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
  • Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
  • The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
  • 1984 by George Orwell
  • The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
  • The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
  • An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
  • Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
  • Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • Lord of the Flies by William Golding
  • The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
  • The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
  • Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
  • The Sound and The Fury by William Faulkner
  • The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
  • The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
  • Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
  • Emma by Jane Austen
  • On The Road by Jack Kerouac
  • The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

Current

  • A Month of Sundays by Julie Mars
  • Small Island by Andrea Levy
  • My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult
  • A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
  • My Life in Orange by Tim Guest
  • Truth & Beauty by Ann Patchett
  • The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
  • The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
  • How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
  • The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
  • Nervous System by Jan Lars Jensen
  • The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
  • The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
  • How the Light Gets In by M. J. Hyland
  • Oracle Night by Paul Auster
  • Quattrocento by James McKean
  • The Opposite of Fate by Amy Tan
  • Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris
  • Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
  • Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
  • The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
  • The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
  • Old School by Tobias Wolff
  • The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
  • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
  • The Bielski Brothers by Peter Duff
  • Brick Lane by Monica Ali
  • Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
  • The Time Traveler's Wife by Audrey Niffenegger
  • Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
  • The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
  • Property by Valerie Martin
  • Rescuing Patty Hearst by Virginia Holman
  • The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson
  • Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
  • The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander
  • Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
  • Bee Season by Myla Goldberg
  • Fat Land : How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
  • Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
  • Unless by Carol Shields
  • Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
  • When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
  • Songbook by Nick Hornby
  • Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
  • Extravagance by Gary Krist
  • Empire Falls by Richard Russo
  • The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
  • Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  • A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
  • The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
  • Me Talk Pretty One Day
    • by David Sedaris
  • Life of Pi by Yann Martel
  • The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
  • The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
  • The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd
  • The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
  • Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn
  • Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
  • The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus

posted by Alida at 8:31 PM
5 comments

5 Comments:
Blogger Jen said...

Rory wanna-be! :)

If I'm not in school next year, I will join you. If I am in school, I'll be too busy reading about teaching people to read to read myself.

(how weird is that, eh?)

8:59 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I will definitely read some of those with you! First I need to figure out which ones I have already read. Then we will go from there. Maybe we could read one of them at the same time? I laughed so hard at the Ja Rule thing. Oh my,too funny!!!!
~linds~

7:29 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

I've read a few of those--from both lists (even some that you haven't read). And someone has way too much "fame on the brain"!!

Mom

9:51 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

One more thing--Grandpa would be proud of you. You should read some of his comments on things that he read--quite articulate and insightful. I remember reading "Huckleberry Finn" because he thought I should read a classic, not because I was interested in the story of a young boy!

By the way, we have Victor Hugo's Hunchback at home, bought before we went to Paris.

Again,
Mom

9:55 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Jazz by Toni Morrison is far better than Beloved. I think you should consider making a switch or addition. :)

9:47 PM  

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