Talkin’ books
July 6, 2006 6:49 pmBragging, bibliophile style. And I wish it were a little more nuanced: I thought Animal Farm was interesting, but in no way did I love it the way I did Harry Potter or Pride and Prejudice. However, that’ not going to stop me from going overboard on this. Hang on to your hats. Real content tba.
from What Should I Read Next?
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown |
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams |
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger |
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald |
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee |
1984 – George Orwell |
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling |
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger |
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman |
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell |
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien |
Life of Pi – Yann Martel |
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller |
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon |
Lord of the Flies – William Golding |
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen |
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut |
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold |
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini |
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden |
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card |
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien |
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown |
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk |
And of course you can always…
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy – Douglas Adams |
The Hobbit – J. R. R. Tolkien |
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – J.K. Rowling |
Ender’s Game – Orson Scott Card |
The Lord of the Rings – J. R. R. Tolkien |
Neuromancer – William Gibson |
American Gods – Neil Gaiman |
Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson |
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis |
Dune – Frank Herbert |
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman |
Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell |
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood |
The Princess Bride – William Goldman |
Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell – Susanna Clarke |
Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury |
Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman |
The Eyre Affair – Jasper Fforde |
Pattern Recognition – William Gibson |
A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin |
The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson |
Cat’s Cradle – Kurt Vonnegut |
The Stand – Stephen King |
Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein |
The Colour of Magic – Terry Pratchett |
People were running around with copies of Pattern Recognition and saying neat things about it right under my very nose for three years, and I never got my hands on one…I think this makes me a failure in bookwormdom.
More notes on lack of nuance: I say I liked Jonathan Strange because it kept my interest. At least, it kept my interest after I slogged through 80 pages. However, since the book is 800 pages long, there was plenty left. I think it would have been a better book at 2/3 the length, though. There were an awful lot of subplots and tangents.
Snow Crash, however, was super cool. I need to read it again one of these days.
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen |
Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte |
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte |
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens |
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott |
Emma – Jane Austen |
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain |
A Tale of Two Cities – Charles Dickens |
Persuasion – Jane Austen |
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen |
Dracula – Bram Stoker |
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer – Mark Twain |
Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy |
Frankenstein – Mary Shelley |
Romeo and Juliet – William Shakespeare |
Hamlet – William Shakespeare |
The Canterbury Tales – Geoffrey Chaucer |
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen |
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne |
The Jungle – Upton Sinclair |
Candide – Voltaire, Norman Cameron |
Complete Tales and Poems – Edgar Allan Poe |
King Lear – William Shakespeare |
Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson |
Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Frankenstein really should be in the same category: I am ambivalent about both. The distinction is that I enjoyed Tess most of the way through, but got frustrated by the ending. I was annoyed with Frankenstein all the way through, but I think the way the story is told is really neat.
Some of you will be amazed that I marked two of the three Shakespeare plays the way I did. For the first, I merely point out that it is, after all, R&J. As for Lear…I dunno. I’m waiting for a production that really makes me like Lear. There’s neat stuff in the text, but the productions I’ve seen (one stage, one film) haven’t cut it. I like the subplot with Gloucester and his sons, but a play loses something when you can’t stand the main character.
And here’s the shocker for some of you who had AP European History with me: I had to read Candide during my freshman year of college and guess what? It was hilarious! Amazing. I think it was a better translation that the thing I slogged through in 10th grade…
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger |
The Great Gatsby – F.Scott Fitzgerald |
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee |
Nineteen Eighty-four – George Orwell |
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story – George Orwell |
Catch-22 – Joseph Heller |
Lord of the Flies – William Golding |
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut |
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley |
A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess |
The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath |
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway |
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov |
The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck |
On the Road – Jack Kerouac |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera |
Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck |
The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand |
Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand |
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas – Hunter S. Thompson |
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho |
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
East of Eden – John Steinbeck |
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – Ken Kesey |
Hmm. So the 20th century isn’t my forte… I probably ought to read some Steinbeck and Hemingway just because. No–I have read some Steinbeck! We read The Pearl in eighth grade. It was depressing…
Well, still.
I really just want to read Lolita because I want to read
Reading Lolita in Tehran.
Slaughterhouse Five is cool, but it warps your mind.
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown |
The Time Traveler’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger |
Life of Pi – Yann Martel |
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon |
The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold |
The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini |
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden |
Angels and Demons – Dan Brown |
Fight Club – Chuck Palahniuk |
Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson |
The Secret History – Donna Tartt |
A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving |
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides |
Atonement – Ian McEwan |
High Fidelity – Nick Hornby |
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
The World According to Garp – John Irving |
Me Talk Pretty One Day – David Sedaris |
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver |
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay – Michael Chabon |
Digital Fortress – Dan Brown |
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami |
The Secret Life of Bees – Sue Monk Kidd |
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture – Douglas Coupland |
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy |
A lot of these I just haven’t heard of. However, I’ve just started The Shadow of the Wind, and it’s exciting so far. And I’ve started Kavalier and Clay at least twice, but never in times and places where I can finish it…then I keep forgetting that my dad actually does own the book… Long story.
I’m not even bothering to include the non-fiction section. The only one I’ve read is Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser (well put-together; likely to make you avoid fast food for a long time). I also own Lynne Truss’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves, which I have read parts of, but not cover to cover. I like it, though. And of course there’s Tuesday’s With Morrie, which we heard part of in ToK. I think there’s a copy of that in the house too, but I’ve never read the end.
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince – J.K. Rowling |
His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman |
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban – J.K. Rowling |
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire – J.K. Rowling |
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – J.K. Rowling |
Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White, Garth Williams |
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets – J.K. Rowling |
The Bad Beginning – Lemony Snicket |
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl |
Sabriel – Garth Nix |
Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll |
Watership Down – Richard Adams |
Eragon – Christopher Paolini |
The Giver – Lois Lowry |
The Once and Future King – T.H. White |
Abhorsen – Garth Nix |
Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery |
A Wrinkle in Time – Madeleine L’Engle, Keith Scaife |
The Witches – Roald Dahl, Quentin Blake |
Time Quartet – Madeleine L’Engle |
The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery |
A Little Princess: The Story of Sara Crewe – Frances Hodgson Burnett |
The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett, Robin Lawrie |
The Outsiders – S.E. Hinton |
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz – L.Frank Baum |
I adore good YA lit. And so many of these are old friends of mine: Little Princess, Secret Garden, Wrinkle in Time, The Giver, Watership Down (which I wouldn’t have classified here, but okay). I’m also a little puzzled about why A Wrinkle in Time is classified separately from the Time Quartet (which starts with Wrinkle).
Philip Pullman rocks.
I admit that I never got through all of a Lemony Snicket book. In my defense, I tried, if not very hard.
I liked it! | I didn’t like it! | I want to read it! |
One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
The Shadow Of The Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon |
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera |
The Wind-up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami |
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky |
Norwegian Wood – Haruki Murakami |
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco |
The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho |
Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco |
Sophie’s World – Jostein Gaarder |
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse |
Dance, Dance, Dance – Haruki Murakami |
Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World – Haruki Murakami |
Blindness – Jose Saramago |
Kafka on the Shore – Haruki Murakami |
A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami |
The Stranger – Albert Camus |
The House of the Spirits – Isabel Allende |
Things Fall Apart – Chinua Achebe |
The Outsider – Albert Camus |
Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow – Peter Hoeg |
Sputnik Sweetheart – Haruki Murakami |
Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel |
South of the Border, West of the Sun – Haruki Murakami |
Take the ‘What have I read?’ test
Again, lots of books I’ve never heard of. And are The Stranger and The Outsider actually two separate books, or was Camus just on a roll? However, I recommend the other two I’ve read.
Anyone actually make it to the end of this mess? Real news coming up real soon…stay tuned.
Edit, 11/26/06. Color Angels & Demons red, Sense & Sensibility green, To Kill a Mockingbird very green, and I’m in the middle of Pattern Recognition. Green so far.
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