Hey, it's officially summertime and my brain is distracted with impending travel and god-awful Tucson temperatures. I finally sat down and scrawled out a list of things to take on the trip to Chicago, and picked the books that get to go on the train ride. Then I stumbled across this meme on GrrlScientist's blog and thought, well, what the hell. This isn't the list of 100 interesting books I would have compiled (each separate Harry Potter? I likey, I likey, but they take up six spots on the list), but it's a summer reading start. Forthwith:
Look at the list of books below:
- Bold the ones you've read
- Italicize the ones you want to read
- Leave unaltered the ones that you aren't interested in or haven't heard of
- My addition: add shame level and snarky comments in brackets after the author name.
- The DaVinci Code (Dan Brown) [shame level high! I know it was stupid! But it was fun!]
- Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen) [liked it okay. liked the Keira Knightley film adaptation okay too.]
- To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee) [as with most of the other classics I had to read in school, I liked this better the second time around as an adult, reading it because I wanted to, not because I had to.]
- Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell) [haven't even seen the movie all the way through. I do want to read The Wind Done Gone (Alice Randall) sometime.
- The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (JRR Tolkien) [saw the movie. does that count?]
- The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (JRR Tolkien)
- The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (JRR Tolkien) [got halfway through before getting severely creeped out by the Ringwraiths, which I found much scarier in print than on the screen.]
- Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery) [I associate this with the white-and-green Yearling edition binding that always made me think old book that was probably required reading for young ladies when my mom was in school.]
- Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) [no idea what this is]
- A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) [another fine mess?]
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (JK Rowling)
- Angels and Demons (Dan Brown) [I know, I know. It was fun!]
- Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (JK Rowling)
- A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) [hated this; don't do well with stories where somebody's mom gets killed; sorry if I just spoiled it for you]
- Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
- Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (JK Rowling)
- Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald)
- The Stand (Stephen King) [aw HELL NO. no vampires, thanks.]
- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (JK Rowling)
- Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte) [one of the classics that's much more enjoyable if you read the Thursday Next novels first]
- The Hobbit (JRR Tolkien)
- The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger) [recently read this for the first time since sophomore high school English, liked it much better without freaky Mrs. Syburg (god rest her soul, even though she gave me severe willies) reading it out loud and cackling.]
- Little Women (Louisa May Alcott) [it's on the shelf; my only experience with the title is as a card in the Authors game I played as a tad with my parents.]
- The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold) [another one I have never heard of]
- Life of Pi (Yann Martel) [heard it is deadly dull, but am open to arguments in favor]
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams) [have read the entire series several times]
- Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte) [if you haven't read it yet, totally read the Thursday Next novels first and it becomes hilarious. Heathcliff and all the other characters are far more enjoyable when framed as unwilling participants in anger management therapy.]
- The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis) [read it as a middle schooler; seem to remember liking The Phantom Tollbooth much better]
- East of Eden (John Steinbeck) [eh]
- Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom) [no, fuck no.]
- Dune (Frank Herbert) [read it in high school and didn't understand a lick of it; should probably pick it up again]
- The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks) [was that a movie? no idea]
- Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand) [it's on the shelf but I don't see it anywhere in the queue in the immediate future]
- 1984 (George Orwell) [yup, in high school, and keep meaning to re-read it to get thoroughly disillusioned with the Bush administration]
- The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley) [shame factor high! makes me feel all SCA-ish!]
- The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
- The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay) [?]
- I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb) [meh]
- The Red Tent (Anita Diamant) [picked it up, put it down, picked it up, put it down, didn't end up buying it]
- The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho) [sounds creepy. if creepy, not reading.]
- The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) [Jean Auel is Gary Jennings' spiritual twin, apparently trying to cram as many sex scenes into a prehistoric setting as possible, with Auel beating Jennings by a nose by virtue of her cringe-inducing flowery prehistoric vernacular. Read this if you want to feel slightly stupid about sex for the next, oh, large bit of forever.]
- The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini) [own it, not sure if it's worth the depression]
- Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella) [already read Bridget Jones; have I not suffered enough?]
- The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom) [aw FUCK NO. what the hell is the fascination with Albom? He's an okay sportswriter, but the pap level of his fiction is more than I can take.]
- The Bible [bits and pieces, but I haven't sat down with it since I got out of my required high school theology classes, which, being set in a Catholic school, were not exactly heavy on the Bible.]
- Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy) [own it, have yet to find a Russian author I can enjoy enough to actually finish a book; Anna Banana is not a likely candidate.]
- The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas) [own it, liked the movie, very much like swordfighting in a platonic non-SCA way]
- Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt) [believe the hype]
- The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck) [Christ, how depressing. read it in high school and got depressed; reading it as an adult would probably make me flirt with the pilot light.]
- She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb) [who is this Lamb guy? can anyone recommend?]
- The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver) [good stuff]
- A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens) [oh, Jeeves? put this one on the list of stuff you hate because you were forced to read it in high school before you had half the life experience necessary to appreciate great literature, but if you read after 30 you'll probably like it. a lot.]
- Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card) [sounds vaguely familiar]
- Great Expectations (Charles Dickens) [be that as it may, I will always want to throttle Pip]
- The Great Gatsby (F Scott Fitzgerald) [gaping hole in my literary enculturation]
- The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence) [Kate says Laurence is good, so I'll give it a go]
- Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (JK Rowling)
- The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough) [shame level high! enjoyed the early '80s miniseries with Richard Chamberlain: shame level even higher!]
- The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood) [should be required for every female of reproductive age]
- The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrew Niffenegger)
- Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky) [again with the Russian thing]
- The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
- War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy) [long winded Russian writers]
- Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice) [HELL NO. NO VAMPIRES.]
- Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
- The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (Ann Brashares)
- One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
- Les Miserables (Victor Hugo)
- The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery) [I seem to remember many middle school classmates loving this book. I never got past the first couple pages.]
- Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding) [shame!]
- Love in the Time of Cholera (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
- Shogun (James Clavell)
- The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
- The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
- The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
- The World According to Garp (John Irving) [John Irving is bent.]
- The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
- Charlotte's Web (E.B. White) [fucking book made me cry when I was seven.]
- Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
- Of Mice And Men (John Steinbeck) [apparently I am not a Steinbeck fan. ignorance or good instincts? you decide.]
- Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
- Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
- Emma (Jane Austen) [I have this but don't remember if I finished it; thus the half-bolded title.]
- Watership Down (Richard Adams) [bunnies, a fun bunny language dictionary in the back, a bittersweet ending that made me cry but not in the bad way fucking Charlotte's Web did; maybe my soft spot for pigs is bigger than the one for bunnies.]
- Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) [read it in high school; don't remember a whit about it.]
- The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
- Blindness (Jose Saramago)
- Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
- In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
- Lord of the Flies (William Golding) [goodness how disturbing; I remember thinking as a kid, shit, did they really kill him?]
- The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck) [also depressing as hell, at least at the time]
- The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
- The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum) [pretty cool]
- The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
- White Oleander (Janet Fitch) [liked it a lot, worth re-reading]
- A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
- The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield) [HELL NO]
- Ulysses (James Joyce) [ah, I keep trying, and will keep trying until I get through it]
4 comments:
Heya - two comments. One, you're missing out on some excellent Canuck fiction: Anne Marie MacDonald is 'Maritime Gothic' of the highest order, and Margaret Laurence is also excellent. (Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye also unmissable for all women, in my opinion.) Second, Towel Day is this friday! (This memorialises Douglas Adams' death; I've never 'observed it, but am tempted given his impact on me.)
Second attempt at leaving a comment:
Great book list.
Ulysses sits on my shelf and taunts me. Bloomsday is fast approaching, perhaps it's time to try again.
And dammit, Mists of Avalon is a great book, and I am going to stop feeling ashamed to say so. Just skip the prequel or sequel or whatever the hell that mess was.
SR
Best scifi - Ender's Game is great but also try Songmaster, Neuromancer, Bolo by Keith Laumer
Best action/mystery - Shibumi, anything by Tony Hillerman, anything by Dick Francis (yes mindcandy, but the good kind)
Best humor - Winterdance, The Dog Who Wouldn't Be, Nobody Sees You Eat Tuna Fish
Best Non-fiction - The Starship and The Canoe, The Good Life, Guns Germs and Steel & Collapse by Jared Diamond
There are many many others but these are some of the best that nobody hears about.
i was just perusing your blog which, because i'm retarded, I thought you hadn't updated since like march (in sum, i discovered that when i bookmarked your page, it doesn't automatically bring me to the most updated page when i re-visit the site, it just goes to the page i'd bookmarked. anyhoo...) and tried to post a comment about that long booklist you put up but it doesn't seem to have taken, so here goes, more or less:
1. To Kill A Mockingbird: A permanent resident on my personal Top 3 of All Time, along with Their Eyes Were Watching God (Hurston) and Young Goodman Brown. TKAM is first among equals, because it's the one I read first and still the one I've read the most times.
2. The Lovely Bones - loved it. It's both very emotional at times (I don't know whether you go for that or not) and also detached, probably b/c of the literary device used, but I loved it.. Also, Peter Jackson will be directing the movie. At first I thought WHAT?!?! But then I remembered that he directed one of fave movies ever, Heavenly Creatures, and I realized he's perfect for this book.
3. Life of Pi - a fave of mine, read it three times, highly recommend. First half is actually pretty funny, esp. the scene with the local representatives of Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. Second half is probably where the "deadly dull" warning you got came from - not much happens on the surface of his life (he's stuck on a boat in the ocean for 8 months!), but narratively it's necessary b/c it's all about spiritual life, about sitting with yourself and your fears (that's the ultra-simplified version). Favorite line from the book, from an inventory of what Pi has while stuck on the lifeboat (and I might be switching the order of the first two) : "One bengal tiger. One ocean. One God." Well worth the read. Great ending, I thought.
4. Never read anything by Ayn Rand! Awful stuff.
5. Interview with the Vampire - I'm kinda the same way on vampires which is why I never made it past the first book, but IWTV has lots of interesting philosophical asides, IMO, that kept me reading.
6. Rebecca - a fave when I was a teen. Very well written, awesome movie, too. better as a book, though, i think.
7. The Outsiders - a fave of mine growing up, I don't know how it would read as an adult...
8. Good call on Celestine Prophecy - don't bother - I couldn't get past the whole Mayans-in-Peru setup, not to mention the digging up something written in Aramaic (and he vociferously sold the book as nonfiction when it came out!) As self-help its lessons are probably perfectly fine but it's unreadable so who cares?
Recommendation, if you haven't already read it: Atonement by Ian McEwan. I went through a 10-year period where I basically didn't read fiction b/c it seemed that every new novel I perused at the bookstore stunk - something about modern style must've turned me off. Anyhoo, this book, which I picked up during an overseas trip in 2002, literally restored my faith in the novel and got me back into fiction (where I'm not nearly as snobby about modern style as I once was, though I still have my preferences). It's gonna be a movie soon, so you're better off reading this now. I esp. liked the parallel commentary peppered through the book about the nature of storytelling itself and whether it needs to contain a moral or can you just create full characters and let 'em rip. I read this mostly on the flight home. Between my awful cold and my weeping, I went to the bathroom every 45 minutes just so the guy next to me could have a break from all my sniffling.
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