Books We Read Redux

I initially snagged this list and instructions from a friend’s LJ (esoterica) and added to it. It was kind of a fun exercise. *Originally posted 02-Oct-2008. Updated 30-Jan-2010*

Bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn’t finish, and strike through what you couldn’t stand. Add an asterisk to those you’ve read more than once. (I didn’t include books I had only reread as a child, i.e., before I went to college, since I often reread favorite books multiple times as a kid.) Underline those you own but haven’t read yet. Put an exclamation point in front of those you haven’t read but that you either want to or think you should. (I added this to the original instructions.)

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell

Anna Karenina

Crime and Punishment

Catch-22

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wuthering Heights

The Silmarillion

Life of Pi: A Novel

The Name of the Rose

Don Quixote

!Moby Dick

Ulysses

Madame Bovary

The Odyssey*

Pride and Prejudice

Jane Eyre

A Tale of Two Cities*

The Brothers Karamazov

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

War and Peace

Vanity Fair

!The Time Traveler’s Wife

The Iliad

Emma

!The Blind Assassin

!The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway

Great Expectations*

American Gods

Atlas Shrugged

Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

Memoirs of a Geisha

Middlesex

Quicksilver

Wicked: the Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales* (Don’t ask me why, but this was one of my favorite books when I was growing up. Yeah, I was odd then, odd now!)

The Historian: A Novel

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World

 

The Fountainhead

Foucault’s Pendulum

Middlemarch

Frankenstein

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

Angels & Demons

The Inferno

The Satanic Verses

Sense and Sensibility

The Picture of Dorian Gray*

Mansfield Park

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles*

Oliver Twist

Gulliver’s Travels

Les Misérables

The Corrections

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time

Dune

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

!Cryptonomicon

Neverwhere

!A Confederacy of Dunces

A Short History of Nearly Everything

Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Should be called: “The Unbearable Heaviness of this Book,” IMO!)

!Beloved

Slaughterhouse-five

The Scarlet Letter

Eats, Shoots & Leaves (She doesn’t even follow her own rather questionable “rules.”)

The Mists of Avalon

Oryx and Crake: A Novel

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

Cloud Atlas

The Confusion

Lolita

Persuasion

Northanger Abbey

The Catcher in the Rye

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*

White Teeth

Treasure Island*

David Copperfield*

The Three Musketeers

The Gay Science*

Three Men in a Boat, to Say Nothing of the Dog* (Funny, funny, funny!)

Barchester Towers (Trollope has me laughing in a way that the venerated Jane Austen never manages.)

Orley Farm (May be even better than Barchester Towers.)

Pnin* (Loved it.)

The Bonfire of the Vanities

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit

Dandelion Wine

The Republic (Plato’s)*

Tao Te Ching*

Death in Venice* (Only reread it multiple times because I taught it. Still, it’s worth at least one reading. The movie adaptation was surprisingly good, and the Mahler music in the background was perfect.)

Robinson Crusoe

The Sorrows of Young Werther*

The Stranger*

Labyrinths*

I, Robot

The Left Hand of Darkness

Ivanhoe

Mill on the Floss

Cat’s Eye

The Persian Expedition*

As I Lay Dying

Lady Chatterley’s Lover*

The Good Soldier*

Briefing for a Descent into Hell

!The Sea, the Sea

The Judge and his Hangman (Der Richter und sein Henker)* (I don’t think I’ve read anything by Dürrenmatt that I haven’t liked. His short stories are wonderful.)

Empire of the Sun

Grendel

A Slight Trick of the Mind*

!The Cosmology of Bing

!Neuromancer

The Remains of the Day

!When We Were Orphans

!The Joy Luck Club

For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Old Man and the Sea

I, Claudius (For some reason, read this multiple times as a teen. Maybe because of the Masterpiece series that was on at the time.)

The Trial*

Tristram Shandy

!The Optimist’s Daughter

The Caine Mutiny

Burger’s Daughter

The Wind in the Willows*

Winnie-the-Pooh*

No Country for Young Men

!Time’s Arrow

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland*

Little Women

The Prisoner of Zenda*

Macbeth*

King Lear*

!Pygmalion

!Of Human Bondage

Brighton Rock (My favorite Graham Greene novel.)

Candide

!Dead Souls

!Flatland

Jude the Obscure* (Don’t read this if you’re depressed . . .)

Of Time and the River

The Wind in the Willows*

Toad of Toad Hall*

Mistress Masham’s Repose (Another childhood favorite, recently rediscovered. Still charming!)

The Master and Margarita*