Book meme

Positive Liberty featured this list; you’re supposed to 1. Bold what you have read; 2. Italicize what you started but couldn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

I loved this book. I read it, I admit, to impress a girl. Turned out to be virtually the only thing of lasting value to come from that relationship.

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: a novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

I do plan to finish this. But when I tried I was in high school, so I have a good excuse for not finishing it.

Moby Dick

Is this really worth the effort? I’ve been thinking about trying.

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

I really enjoyed this. Another book that I read to impress a girl. (Different girl.) I enjoyed the style, even if it was a translation.

The Odyssey

I love the Greeks. I’ve read this three times, but I like The Iliad more.

Pride and Prejudice

I read this for a girl, also. (Yet a third one.) Enjoyed it.

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities

I started this after reading Great Expectations just to be sure I hate Dickens as much as I really do. Yes, I do.

The Brothers Karamazov

Great. Every bit as good as Crime And Punishment. “The Grand Inquisitor” and the chapter just before it are alone worth the effort. I read this in law school, when I was supposed to be studying for Corporations.

Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

Wonderful. But you must get Robert Fagles’ translation. No other will do. Definitely not the ultra-literal Lattimore.

Emma

The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

The Kite Runner? Why The Kite Runner? I’m sure it’s a good book, but why is it on this list?

Mrs. Dalloway

Who?

Great Expectations

I consider this the worst novel in the English language. Absolutely horrible. And required in California government schools. As a form of torture, you see, to ensure that kids learn to hate reading. Dear fucking lord, what a bad book.

American Gods

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books

I was surprised by how much I liked this book. It tends to ramble a little bit at times, but I found it moving and powerful and extremely important.

Memoirs of a Geisha

See Great Expectations.

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

What? Is this a classic?

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian: a novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

Another one of those abandoned high school ambitions.

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

This was forced on me by an English teacher who was mad that I kept not reading the assigned books.

The Count of Monte Cristo

Dracula

A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys

The Once and Future King

The Grapes of Wrath

The Poisonwood Bible: a novel

1984

This is on my re-read list for 2008.

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

You notice they don’t say The Divine Comedy, cause they know nobody’s ever actually read the whole Divine Comedy.

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray

I tried to read this for a girl. (A fourth girl.) She wasn’t worth it.

Mansfield Park

One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

I’m assuming audio books count.

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Dune

I’m reading this now, actually.

The Prince

The Sound and the Fury

Angela’s Ashes: a memoir

The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present

This one gives Great Expectations a run for its money. This is the most carefully, systematically fraudulent book I’ve ever encountered from a major publisher. It was, of course, required reading in my American history class at Chaffey Community College. Did you know that the Salem Witch Trials were not an incident of mass hysteria, but actually a battle in the class war? I finally stopped going to that class. I knew communism and I knew American history, so I could pretty much figure out the questions on the final. And I got an A.

Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake : a novel

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

The audio book of this is the best audio book I’ve ever heard.

Persuasion

The Jane Austen girl and I didn't last long enough.

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

Read this for girl number 1 listed above. And, as I said, Dostoyevsky was the only thing worth remembering from that relationship.

On the Road

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

The Aeneid

Watership Down

Gravity’s Rainbow

The Hobbit

I just don’t get it. Sorry. Magic doesn’t do it for me. That’s why I’m not enjoying Dune.

In Cold Blood : A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences

White Teeth

Treasure Island

David Copperfield

The Three Musketeers