Number 4 down: Maus

I finished Maus on Monday, but I couldn't write about it until today. A lot of people feel kind of inundated with Holocaust stories, I know, but I don't think it's possible (for me, anyway) to become desensitized to them. I cried when I finished the second volume - for the miracle the Spiegelmans had in surviving and finding one another, for their losses, for the horrors they witnessed, and for the crazy tumultuous mixture of emotions coming from their son, Art, as he writes the story. Five of five stars, no question. Full review on Corrodentia Weekly and also on GoodReads.

Infinite Summer

I know that I'm not the only one with Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace on my list. I'm probably also not the only one intimidated by the modern-day behemoth. Well, some folks have started an internet collaboration to read the book over the summer, rather like we have banded together to do for Middlemay. They're calling it Infinite Summer. It starts on June 21 and breaks the book up into about 75 pages a week until around September 21 or so. Just thought some of you might be interested - their web page is http://infinitesummer.org/ and they have a group going on Facebook too. I haven't decided yet if I'm going to participate, but I'm thinking about it...

Book three DONE: Running with Scissors

While wading through Middlemarch, I took breaks reading another book from my list, Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Nutshell: funny, disturbing, disgusting, and I don't believe that this book is entirely the gospel truth. :) 4 of 5 stars. Full review found here on my blog, Corrodentia Weekly, or here on GoodReads.

Finished #2, The Member of the Wedding

I'm reading these a little more slowly than some of you, I think, because I'm reading other books in between! But I have finished the second book on my list, The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers. I feel that I have to confess here that I adore Southern literature, and I've been hooked on McCullers since I read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter in 10th grade. This book was phenomenal. 5 out of 5 stars. McCullers just has this way of making you feel the characters emotions so close and personal that they might as well be your own...all the more impressive with the main characters is a preteen girl, and you haven't felt that way yourself in 20 or more years. I wrote a longer review of it over at my blog, Corrodentia Weekly, and also on GoodReads, if you're interested. I just got back from a trip out of town, so I did three book reviews in one post on my blog - look for the last book in the post to see my review of this one.

Up next is Middlemarch, as I'll be joining the Middlemay group to read this. First, though, I have to finish Eat, Pray, Love and then for my book club, I have to read The Graveyard Book. Whew!

Finished The Awakening

I mentioned on MoonRat's post that I had finished my first book on the list, Kate Chopin's The Awakening. My nutshell review: I like the whole find-yourself-and-live-your-own-life thing, but I found the heroine inconsiderate and self-absorbed. Three of five stars.

If you want to see the full review, check out Corrodentia Weekly or GoodReads.

Jen at Corrodentia Weekly's List

Quick disclaimer: eight of the books on my list are things I've read before, but I read them so long ago and I only read them once; I keep meaning to re-read them but keep putting them off for other, less intense books, as with the rest of the list that I've never read. I marked the ones I've read before with "(R)" in front of the titles. And I'm co-blogging some of the reviews and such over at my blog, Corrodentia Weekly.

1. Watership Down, Richard Adams
2. The Man with the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren
3. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
4. The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
5. Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
6. (R) Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
7. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
8. Continental Drift, Russell Banks
9. Peter Pan, J M Barrie *12/1/2009
10. The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
11. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
12. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
13. (R) Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
14. The Good Earth, Pearl S Buck
15. Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
16. Running with Scissors, Augusten Burroughs *5/7/2009
17. Possession, A S Byatt
18. The Plague, Albert Camus
19. In Cold Blood, Truman Capote
20. My Antonia, Willa Cather
21. The Awakening, Kate Chopin *4/8/2009
22. Agatha Christie: An Autobiography, Agatha Christie
23. The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins
24. The Man in the High Castle, Philip K Dick
25. David Copperfield, Charles Dickens
26. Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens
27. Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. The Barrytown Trilogy, Roddy Doyle
29. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
30. The House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III
31. Middlemarch, George Eliot *12/21/2009
32. Spartacus, Howard Fast
33. Absalom, Absalom!, William Faulkner
34. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
35. This Side of Paradise, F Scott Fitzgerald
36. A Room with a View, E M Forster
37. Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier
38. Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy
39. Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy
40. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
41. A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway
42. (R) The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
43. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
44. (R) Brave New World, Aldous Huxley *2/7/2010
45. A Prayer for Owen Meany, John Irving
46. The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro
47. The Lottery, Shirley Jackson
48. We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Shirley Jackson
49. Daisy Miller, Henry James
50. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey
51. The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
52. The Jungle Book, Rudyard Kipling
53. Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri
54. The Road to Lichfield, Penelope Lively
55. At the Mountains of Madness, H P Lovecraft
56. Of Human Bondage, Somerset Maugham
57. Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
58. The Road, Cormac McCarth
59. The Member of the Wedding, Carson McCullers *4/17/2009
60. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
61. Promethea, Alan Moore
62. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, Haruki Murakami
63. Invitation to a Beheading, Vladimir Nabokov
64. Everything that Rises Must Converge, Flannery O'Connor
65. Animal Farm, George Orwell
66. (R) Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
67. Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
68. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
69. Six Characters in Search of an Author, Luigi Pirandello
70. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig
71. The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
72. The Wanderers, Richard Price
73. The Shipping News, E Annie Proulx
74. (R) The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
75. The Human Stain, Philip Roth
76. The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
77. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
78. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith
79. Fair and Tender Ladies, Lee Smith *1/22/2010
80. Maus, Art Spiegelman *6/1/2009
81. Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne
82. Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
83. The Secret History, Donna Tartt
84. Short Stories of Mark Twain, Mark Twain
85. The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
86. Burr, Gore Vidal
87. Myra Breckenridge/Myron, Gore Vidal
88. Candide, Voltaire
89. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
90. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
91. All the King's Men, Robert Penn Warren
92. (R) A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
93. (R) A Curtain of Green, Eudora Welty
94. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
95. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde
96. Look Homeward, Angel, Thomas Wolfe
97. The Bonfire of the Vanities, Tom Wolfe
98. Orlando, Virginia Woolf
99. Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
100. The Book Thief, Mark Zusak