Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Karen's Revised List

So here's the thing: I've been on this project for a year and a half and I've made diddly progress. And I keep buying books. Why do I keep buying books when I have a list of a hundred books to read, all of which I could find at the library? That's a good question. I'll answer it after I get my next paycheck.

Currently, I have TWENTY SIX unread books on my shelf. So I'm changing my list, because I consider not having read Mathilda Savitch a more pressing gap than not having read Predictably Irrational. Blogs exist to save me from having to read non-fiction.

In the past year, my interests have shifted, and it has become more important to me to read certain types of books and less important to me to read other kinds of books. FORGET MARK TWAIN.

My 19 additions.
1. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, David Wroblewski. (Read it, refuse to review it, as I spent too much time on it already.)
2. The Children's Hospital, Chris Adrian
3. Super Sad True Love Story, Gary Shteyngart
4. Bad Marie, Marcy Dermanski
5. Aurorarama, Jean-Christophe Valtat
6. The Tower, the Zoo, and the Tortoise, Julie Stuart
7. Mathilda Savitch, Victor Lodato
8. Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert
9. The Forest of Hands and Teeth, Carrie Ryan
10. Olive Kitteredge, Elizabeth Strout
11. A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore
12. The Year of the Flood, Margaret Atwood
13. Outfoxed (Foxhunting Mysteries), Rita Mae Brown
14. Thoroughbred Tales: An Anthology of Fiction
15. Some Horses: Essays, Thomas McGuane
16. The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ, Philip Pullman
17. Losing Charlotte, Heather Clay
18. Fairies and the Quest for Never Land, Gail Carson Levine (shut up)
19. Southern Vampire Mysteries Boxed Set, Charlaine Harris



The Original 100:
Bolded books are currently being read or are finished. Books italicized with the word SPLAT after it are books that I have decided not to care about.

1. A Book of Common Prayer, Joan Didion. SPLAT
2. A Circle of Quiet, Madeleine L’Engle
3. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain, Abandoned
4. A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolfe
5. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens
6. A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. LeGuin
7. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain (Forget Mark Twain except for where it concerns my boyfriend, Tom Sawyer)
8. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
9. Animal Farm, George Orwell. SPLAT. Read 1984.
10. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. SPLAT. Read Fountainhead.
11. Atmospheric Disturbances, Rivka Galchen (ABANDONED)
12. Baudolino, Umberto Eco
13. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
14. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley. SPLAT. Was only on the list because I was trying to come up with 100.
15. Cannery Row, John Steinbeck
16. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
17. Changing Places, David Lodge. SPLAT.
18. Crossing to Safety, Wallace Stegner. SPLAT.
19. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann. SPLAT.
20. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak
21. Dune, Frank Herbert
22. Eve’s Diary, Mark Twain. SPLAT. FORGET MARK TWAIN.
23. Faust (Goethe)
24. Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
25. House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
26. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Julia Alvarez
27. Hyperion Cantos, Dan Simmons
28. Ilium, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
29. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
30. Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
31. Ishmael, Daniel Quinn. SPLAT. This books is falling way out of favor, huh?
32. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott. SPLAT.
33. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
34. Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H Lawrence
35. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
36. Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
37. Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis. SPLAT.
38. Madam Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
39. Middlemarch, George Eliot (ABANDONED)
40. Moby Dick, Herman Melville
41. My Antonia, Willa Cather. SPLAT.
42. Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs
43. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
44. Old Man’s War, John Scalzi
45. Olympos, Dan Simmons. SPLAT.
46. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
47. Once Upon a Time in the North, Philip Pullman
48. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
49. Orlando, Virginia Woolfe
50. Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
51. Out Stealing Horses, Per Patterson
52. Peyton Place, Grace Metalious. SPLAT.
53. Portnoy's Complaint, Philip Roth
54. Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely. SPLAT.
55. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
56. Rebecca, Daphne Du Maurier
57. Red Badge of Courage, Stephen Crane
58. Revolutionary Road, Robert Yates
59. She's Come Undone, Wally Lamb
60. Sophie's Choice, William Styron. SPLAT.
61. Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust
62. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
63. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
64. The Best Day of Somebody Else’s Life, Kerry Reichs
65. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
66. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky
67. The Call of the Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft
68. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
69. The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier
70. The Coast of Good Intentions, Michael Byers
71. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Mark Haddon
72. The Elegance of the Hedgehog, Muriel Barbery (Read it, didn't review it, didn't like it.)
73. The Eustace Diamonds, Anthony Trollope. SPLAT.
74. The Gravedigger’s Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates. (Read it, think I didn't review it, didn't like it.)
75. The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
76. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
77. The Irrational Season, Madeleine L’Engle
78. The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, Umberto Eco
79. The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco
80. The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemmingway
81. The Once and Future King, T.H. White
82. The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
83. The Pillars of the Earth, Ken Follet
84. The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
85. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
86. The Screwtape Letters, CS Lewis
87. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
88. The Summer of the Great-grandmother, Madeleine L’Engle
89. The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
90. The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
91. The Widows of Eastwick, John Updike
92. The World According to Garp, John Irving
93. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
94. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
95. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, Jules Verne
96. Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, Madeleine L’Engle
97. Ulysses, James Joyce
98. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
99. Water for Elephants, Sara Gruen. (Read it, didn't review it, LOVED IT.)
100. Watership Down, Richard Adams

6 comments:

Alyssa said...

What a cool paper topic! I've enjoyed several good arguement/discussions about the religious aspects of HDM.

Looks like a good list.

moonrat said...

Yeah, can you share your paper?

Michael Chabon wrote a looong essay about the importance of HDM in MAPS AND LEGENDS, but I stopped reading after a couple of pages because I didn't want it to spoil that series for me (I haven't read it).

good list. wow for alphabetical order. my plan is more frivolous--I bought alllll the books, and then when i finish one i reach out and grab something i'm in the mood to tackle.

Anonymous said...

Hey Karen - I wasn't a religion major but I went from English major to div. school for a Master's in Theology - I'd love to compare notes with you sometime!

00 Pisces said...

Sure, I can try to share the paper. It's saved somewhere--I'll have to look for it. I do distinctly remember the computer crashing twelve hours before the paper was due, so no guarantees that reading it won't give you an empathetic caffeine buzz. ;-)

--Karen

Backfence said...

Karen: Yes - Kindle has a built in dictionary - Mine uses the Oxford American Dictionary, but there are several other selections. Can't speak for the "new and improved" Kindle 2.

CJ

00 Pisces said...

FYI, for those reading this post now, the previous draft mentioned that I did my undergraduate thesis on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman.