Book Meme.

I got this from Carolee’s blog, who got it here. What I’ve read is in bold — yes, mind the gaps. Ah well, no one’s reading list is as well-rounded as she’d like.

(Now someone should compile a poetry list…)

Beowulf
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
Brontë, Charlotte – Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily – Wuthering Heights

Camus, Albert – The Stranger
Cather, Willa – Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey – The Canterbury Tales
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
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
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
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
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
O’Connor, Flannery – A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene – Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George – Animal Farm
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
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
Sophocles – Oedipus Rex

Steinbeck, John – The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis – Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher – Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan – Gulliver’s Travels
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

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

12 responses to “Book Meme.”

  1. wow… I would be SO embarrassed to bold the ones I’ve read. It would only take a few seconds!!

  2. I want that poetry list!

  3. Funny, Michael — I think classics began to drop from my reading stacks just about the time I became a bookseller…

    Lily! Are you volunteering??

  4. Oh, you are GOOD!

    But sure, I’ll do a list. How about if I do twenty, you do twenty, and others do twenty and we put them up. With this genre, though, I think it should be poets, not poems. I mean, everybody should read some Wordsworth. It doesn’t matter if it’s the whole prelude or it’s that poem about daffodils or the one about clouds (oh, I have such a bad memory, but I’m CERTAIN he’s done both….). And, also, I’m bad at poets in other languages, but I’ll but somebody else is good.

    So, here are my twenty: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Spencer, Milton, Donne, Coleridge, Wordsworth, oh god I’ve missed a hundred years in there, but I’m on a roll, Eliot, Stevens, Dickinson, Whitman, Yeats, how is it possible there’s only ONE WOMAN so far, very bad, Brooks, Bishop, Moore, Sexton, Plath, Rich, and I’ll leave later ones to you, except Gauthier, Bolden, and oh, I used to really like Forche, and I’ll confess to Collins and Koozer oh and Neruda and I’m missing so many others, but that’s the twenty three I came up with this instant and yes, I know, it’s heavy on the canon and there are tons of other good people, and I’ll add more when I have time, oh, yes, Milosz and Akhmatova, and Merrill, also Heaney and Wolcott, oh, and Hecht.

    For a long time on my blog I’ve been slowly making my way through my hundred favorite poems, but I’ve stalled a little and this reminds me I need to get going.

  5. Okay, you got 52 out of 101… I got 20!!!!!!!!

    Ann and I are going to feature this on the next episode of the podcast!

  6. […] Really Long List With Annotations Posted May 29, 2008 This comes from Marie. You’re supposed to bold which of these 100 canonical books you’ve read.  I’ve […]

  7. Michael — are you saying I win?? How very kind of you to abase yourself for my benefit! ;o)
    That is one podcast I will not miss, thank you!

    Okay, Lily, my list is done…

  8. […] 30, 2008 in poetry Tags: memes, poetry, poets So this is the Poet Meme that Bloglily took me up on. I’ve concentrated on primarily American poets of a certain age […]

  9. I am impressed with myself! I have read 65 of these, but this list has revealed a gaping hole in The Library of Books I Have Read. I mulled it over, and it seems as if the only Russian novel I have ever read is Lolita. A travesty! I am most proud of having read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, albeit because I was forced to for a history class long, long ago.

    Marie, if you decide to work on this list, may I suggest that you read To Kill a Mockingbird? Because it is, without a doubt, my favorite book of all time. I make it a point to read it at least once a year. And also The Sound and the Fury, because Caddy is one of my favorite characters of all time. Also Their Eyes Were Watching God, because of passages like this:

    Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some, they come in with the tide. For others, they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men.

    O! O! O!

  10. PS: Have you ever met anyone who has actually read Vanity Fair? I have not! 🙂

  11. Molto bene, Zelda! That is most superior!

    I actually own Their Eyes Were Watching God, but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet — I will!

  12. Hooray! I know you will enjoy it.

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