1. The World According To Garp (Irving)2. Very Little after the first five books of the Bible (God)
3. Don Quixote (Cervantes)
4. The Republic (Plato)
5. Aeneid (Virgil)
6. Gilgamesh (Shin-eqi-unninni)
7. Inferno (Dante)
8. Gargantuan and Pantegruel (Rabelais)
9. Ulysses (Joyce)
10. Anna Karenina (Tostoy)
11. Moby Dick (all the way through) (Melville)12. Notes from the Underground (Dostoevsky)
13. Middlemarch (Eliot)
14. Great Expectation (Dickens)
15. David Copperfield (Dickens)
16. Tristram Shandy (Sterne)
17. The Red and the Black (Stendahl)
18. Mrs. Dalloway (Woolf)
19. Eugene Onegin (Pushkin)
20. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)
21. Herzog (Bellow)
22. The Sun Also Rises (Hemingway)23. To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee)
24. Turn of the Screw (Henry James)
25. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (Twain)
26. The Way We Live Now (Trollope) 27. Sons and Lovers (Lawrence)
28. Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton)
29. Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon)
30. The Yeshiva (Grade)
31. The Dubliners (Joyce)
32. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Chabon)
33. Pamela (Richardson)
34. Shamela (Fielding)
35. Return of the Native (Hardy)
36. The Tin Drum (Grass)
37. My Antonia (Cather)
38. Darkness at Noon (Koestler)
39. Gone With the Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
40. However, I have read War and Peace – Twice (Tolstoy and Tolstoy)
9 comments:
What a refreshing take on book lists, especially from that stereotypically haughty and dismissive breed - the English teacher! You go, Hill!
Mark Twain: A classic is a book everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.
Anna Karenina ia disappointing. She gets seduced ridiculously fast, is immediately ashamed, doesn't break it off, and commits suicide. The other character we follow gets the nice girl eventually. There. Book ruined in two sentences. on the other hand, if you like long, long, long descriptions and Russian agonizing, read and enjoy. Our book club gave it a thumbs down - no other reason will make you read this one except you know that 10 other people are reading it, too, and will be ready to talk about it, whether you are or not.
I think I’ve read 17 of these titles (#’s 1, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 27, 35). Of those, the nine I enjoyed are: The World According to Garp, Ulysses, Moby Dick, Middlemarch, Mrs. Dalloway, A Connecticut Yankee, Return of the Native, To Kill a Mockingbird (hard to believe you haven’t read this one—but that’s more an oddity than a cause of shame), and Anna Karenina.
I made several lists like this back when I was first thinking about going to grad school. In most cases, though, the only thing I remember about the novels I read is whether I enjoyed them or not. That probably has something to do with the fact that I feel no shame or embarrassment about not having read the other 22 books on your list. In the end, all that’s left me is “Thumbs Up” or “Thumbs Down.” As the future president of the Modern Language Association said to me once, “Literature is overrated.” I am curious, though, about The Amazing Adventures, My Antonia, and War and Peace. I bought Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno when I was reading The Dante Club (Pearl), but didn’t read it.
I am more likely to feel shame and embarrassment when I am not able to offer a sensible account of the literary theories of one or another critic or when I cannot remember the names of some of the principal characters in one of the educator-hero dramas I’m doing my dissertation on. I also feel some shame about not having read more of the books I’ve bought over the past year or so, including, for example, Freakonomics (Levitt and Dubner), The English Novel (Eagleton), The Tipping Point (Gladwell), The Amboy Dukes (Shulman), and Moab is My Washpot (Fry). There are probably more, but since all our books are packed in boxes, I can’t recall them.
I also feel some shame about not having read more of The Chronicle of Higher Education, which I subscribe to, and The New Yorker, another current subscription, and as a result I keep copies of them both around the house longer and carry them around in my backpack longer than I should.
I also regret that I have not done more reading about Fidel Castro. I find him appealing in many ways, but don’t know enough about the “dark side” to take a clear position on his virtue/vice make-up.
I wish I’d read Eagleton’s book on Terrorism: Holy Terror (for that matter, I wish I’d read everything he has written).
Does the absence of Buddenbrooks (Mann) and Remembrance of Things Past (Proust) mean you’ve read them? I never managed to get them off my lists. I assume you've read One Hundred Years of Solitude? If not, you should be ashamed of yourself . . .
Another cause for shame: I bought but have not read We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (Gourevitch).
i've read 6 of these books.
Inferno--forced to read it for sr. english class--did not like it, but thought i might be interested in it again after reading the dante club
Plato's Republic--i've read this book at least 3 times--also did not like it any of those times, but it gave me some interesting fodder for the papers I was writing about it at the time
To Kill A Mockingbird--I really liked this book when I read it as a young girl, say in the 6th or 7th grade. a cool book for a young girl to read about another young girl.
Herzog--I read this in preparation for a visit from Saul Bellow to my senior class. I don't remember much about it.
The Sun Also Rises--I remember enjoying this book. but not much else about it.
Gone WIth THe WInd--this was a hard book for me to get through when I was in 6th or 7th grade. i finished it more out of a sense of duty rather than because I was enjoying it.
And if I recall correctly, Lise, Saul Bellow came to speak to your class at Bartlesville High Schol and you thought he was a jerk because he gave a condescending answer to a question you asked?
I had forgotten that, but it sounds vaguely familiar.
You forgot the meeting Saul Bellow part? Have many Nobel Prize winners have you interviewed?
no i didn't forget that i met saul bellow. i forgot that he was condescending.
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