I've always wanted to do this meme

[jaala]

Books/plays I've read (and commentary on some I haven't read):

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
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
(What? No "Robert Bolt - A Man for All Seasons"? It's better than The Crucible...)
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger (I've intended to read this for the longest time)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (some of them)
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 - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (read an abridged version as a child--boo! hiss!)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
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
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 (but I've read Marlowe's Dr. Faustus and know an opera based on Goethe's Faust)
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 (I've tried to read two Hemingway books but couldn't finish because I got too bored)
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (but I've read an incredible number of other dystopian novels; furthermore, I've read More's Utopia)
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
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
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
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
Nabokov, Vladimir - Lolita
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night (I've seen the whole thing performed. Does that count?)
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (but I've read 1984)
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 (really should read this as I loved the movie)
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone (but I've read Anouilh's version)
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Steinbeck, John - East of Eden
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
(What? No Tom Stoppard?)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (I think I read the whole thing)
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 (well, some of it--I got too depressed to finish)
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
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

Only seven books on this list were required reading in school! On the other hand, they tried to get us to read a moderate amount of CanLit and there's almost none of that on the list. (Anybody ever heard of Margaret Atwood? Timothy Findley?)

Comments

Gregor Samsa awoke one morning to find he had been turned into a giant cockroach.

[soubrette.livejournal.com]

Nah, too good.

I've heard of Margaret Attwood, but have so far only read one of her books, "Bodily Harm". Apparently it's one of her poorer ones, but I thought it was OK. A lady was about to bring it to the charity shop when I was working at yon stationer's still, and since I expressed interest in it being an Attwood novel, she gave the book to me instead. Hey, whatever works.

About the Hemingway: HAHAHAHAHAHA. A Farewell to Arms wasn't that bad IMO, but I do have a bit of a masculine brain, so...

I think we can just be happy that we know and love the Bernstein Candide. I'll try to read the Voltaire original sometime anyway.

Ditto on Antigone; read it in 1995 for AP French Lit. (Damn lucky too, since I only did half of the reading for that exam and that happened to be one of the essay topics!)

I think I might do that meme at some point, with commentary.

I'm reading plays I read this morning!

[jaala]

That's Atwood, dear. </pedant>

Re: Hemingway: Well, :-P (my ultra-intelligent response)! I don't think I tried A Farewell to Arms, actually... got too frustrated by For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man And The Sea.

Re: Antigone: I'm a fraud. We read a translation in (oddly enough) English class.

A bit of interesting information about Atwood

[jaala]

The Handmaid's Tale (which I've always intended to read, it's one of her better-known works) was recently made into an opera. Now, after being performed in Denmark and the UK, it's finally being brought to Canada this autumn.

Re: A bit of interesting information about Atwood

[gridlockjoe.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to see The Handmaid's Tale as an opera. The movie was interesting, but not as good as the book.

[chriscwej.livejournal.com]

I better not do this one in full :) My list would only stretch to:
- Robinson Crusoe
- Lord of the Flies (school text)
- The Odyssey (well, Ulysses... but only because I thought it was going to be the book from the Ulysses 3000 cartoon...)
- Brave New World (school text)
- Macbeth (school text - seen plays of Romeo & Midsummer)
- Treasure Island (actually might have just seen on TV)
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

And also A Man For All Seasons (school text).

Trying to think what else I did at school that's not on the list... That Eye The Sky, The Accidental Tourist, 12 Angry Men and The Winslow Boy (play scripts), Schindler's List and 1984 (movies), Of Mice And Men, 39 Steps, Day of the Triffids, Z for Zachariah, In Country, some short story anthologies and others...

There's a Dickens anthology, the works of Shakespeare and a few others of these lying around here somewhere, but also a large pile of more interesting books I'd rather read first!

[michaelsjournal.livejournal.com]

Why is Shelley on this list, while Stoker is absent? Where's Burgess? What about Rand? Why do Faulkiner and Melville appear twice, yet Davies, Richler and Atwood are all absent? (Obviously, because the list was written by an American.) What's the deal with To The Lighthouse and Beloved being on the list, but not Orlando and The Bluest Eye, when the latter two are generally considered to be more influential? Where's the Wole Soyinka (sp?)?

Oh, and what about War And Peace?

I'd do this meme, but I've got too many issues with that list...

[jaala]

You read a lot more non-Shakespeare "classics" in school than I did. Interesting. I love A Man For All Seasons, which probably has something to do with the fact that I wasn't required to read it in school :-) . I might like the plays of Sam Shepard if we hadn't been required in Grade 11 not only to read them but to act them as well. What a traumatic experience that was...

[jaala]

Good questions, it is true...

[plotinus.livejournal.com]

I'd do this meme, but I've got too many issues with that list...

Aren't issues with the list the whole point?

[jaala]

At least with the way I filled it out, they are! I doubt that's the original intent but it was more fun this way.

[banditprincess.livejournal.com]

I've read two Margret Atwood books. "The Handmaid's Tale" and "Alias Grace".

Handmaid's Tale is...um...odd. The movie was even odder.

Alias Grace, however, is one of my all time favourite books. EVAH. It's just...great...I can't explain it, I just love it to pieces.

[jaala]

I have added Alias Grace to my (long) "to read" list!

Re: A bit of interesting information about Atwood

[jaala]

As I say, I haven't read the book, but what I saw of the movie was a bit of a disappointment. I am very much looking forward to the opera and hope I can get tickets.

[michaelsjournal.livejournal.com]

If it's a balanced list, yes. But this is clearly an American lit weighted list... and although I live in the US now, and I've read Moby Dick and a stack of other American lit, I don't think this meme is really good indicator of how well-read someone is.

Maybe I'm just methodology-obsessed.

[michaelsjournal.livejournal.com]

War and Peace is there... I feel silly, now.

[chriscwej.livejournal.com]

I guess our school was pretty focussed on the more modern 'classics', although looking back at it I think they tried to give us at least one Australian and one short story/play/anthology each year.

We did A Man For All Seasons in Year 11 I think, had to answer all those typical over-analytical questions about quotes from the book and pragmatism etc. My youngest brother played Sir Thomas in the school play a couple of years ago.

[banditprincess.livejournal.com]

OMG, if you do, I beg you to tell me when you finish it. I've been begging everyone I know to read it, so that I'll have someone to discuss it with, because, once you read it, you'll understand why I say it's the best conversational/debateable book. LOVE IT!

Re: A bit of interesting information about Atwood

[banditprincess.livejournal.com]

That would be one helluva disturbing opera, if you ask me

I, personally, would like to see a bigger budget version of the movie. With the sci-fi undertones it has, it could really make a very interesting indy movie...