Accidental Ambivalence

Expanding My Mind

Recently, it was brought to my attention that I know a lot about literature. I can rattle off titles and authors and give you plot summaries, and I’ve read a lot of things that the average person hasn’t read and never will. However, many of these great, classic books that everyone raves about – I haven’t actually read them.

There are some that I really have no desire to read. Moby Dick? I honestly never want to read it and I hope I can manage not to. Melville drives me batty. Anything Ernest Hemingway wrote won’t be joining my favorites list, and it’s highly unlikely that Stephen Crane will suddenly become my new favorite novelist.

I went searching for a list of the essential classics, but none that I found really struck my fancy. So, after some consideration, I decided to modify one of the lists to suit what I want to read. As it stands, after my omissions and additions, I have a list of eighty-nine books that I have every intention of reading.

Don’t misunderstand, I don’t really have any intention of finishing this within the year. Still being in school, that would be nearly impossible. Once I’m finished with school or have a vacation or just catch a wild hair, I’ll start going after the list in earnest, but for right now it’s just not practical. I will, however, finish the list. I’m setting the goal, right now, at finishing the list before I’m thirty, though I’m really shooting for twenty-five.

Anything in bold I’ve already read, though most of it I’ve read long enough ago that I intend to reread it. Wish me luck!

Breakfast at Tiffany’s – Truman Capote
In Cold Blood – Truman Capote
Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Ulysses - James Joyce
In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
The Brothers Karamazov - Feodor Dostoevsky
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Emma - Jane Austen
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Absalom, Absalom! - William Faulkner
The Ambassadors - Henry James
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoevsky
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
The Odyssey – Homer
The Iliad – Homer
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
Things Fall Apart - Chinue Achebe
My Antonia - Willa Cather
The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
The Awakening - Kate Chopin
The Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
Uncle Tom's Cabin - Harriet Beecher Stowe
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
On the Road - Jack Kerouac
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
The Hound of Baskervilles - Arthur Conan Doyle
Gone with the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
The Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
The Little Prince -Antoine de Saint-Exupery
The Talented Mr. Ripley - Patricia Highsmith
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Color Purple - Alice Walker
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
Ariel – Sylvia Plath
Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Tender is the Night - F. Scott Fitzgerald
As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
The Naked and the Dead - Norman Mailer
The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
From Here to Eternity - James Jones
A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
Sophie’s Choice - William Styron
Gravity’s Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
Guilty Pleasures - Laurell K. Hamilton
Dante’s Inferno – Dante Alighieri
The Faerie Queene – Edmund Spenser
Paradise Lost – John Milton
Dangerous Liasons - Pierre-Ambroise-François Choderlos de Laclos
Harry Potter (series) – J.K. Rowling
The Lord of the Rings (trilogy) – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Silence of the Lambs (and others) – Thomas Harris

Labels: lists, my insanity

posted by nicalyse @ 1:10 AM