106 books

[holdouttrout]

Because it was fun coding all the little text tags. ;-P

Or I'm just a freak. annerbhp thinks so, anyway.

EDIT: Bold means I've read it. Italics means I started to read it and couldn't finish it. Underline means that I want to read it. And Strikethrough is supposed to mean I couldn't stand it, but I have only ever read two books I couldn't stand, and they are not on this list.

ALSO EDIT: Asterisks are books I've read more than once. That'll teach me to read the instructions, eh?



1984
A Clockwork Orange
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
A People's History of the United States: 1492-present--I haven't read all of it, but I have read a significant chunk.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
A Short History of Nearly Everything
A Tale of Two Cities
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela's Ashes: a memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
Brave New World*
Catch-22
Cloud Atlas
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula
Dubliners
Dune*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma*
Foucault's Pendulum
Frankenstein*
Freakonomics: a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Gravity's Rainbow
Great Expectations
Gulliver's Travels
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences
Jane Eyre*
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Moby Dick
Mrs. Dalloway
Neverwhere
Northanger Abbey
Oliver Twist
On the Road
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Persuasion*
Pride and Prejudice*
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran: a memoir in books
Sense and Sensibility*
Slaughterhouse-five
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Blind Assassin
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales--but then, neither did Chaucer.
The Catcher in the Rye
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo--I'm sorry. I know people love this book, but I just couldn't do it.
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
The Fountainhead
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit*
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
The Inferno Once was enough.
The Kite Runner
The Mists of Avalon
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Once and Future King
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
The Prince
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter*
The Silmarillion
The Sound and the Fury
The Three Musketeers
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island*
Ulysses
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked: the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values



*_*_*_*_*

Comments

[pepper-field.livejournal.com]

So what do the little asterisks mean?

What did you think of Wicked? I liked it. It reminded me a lot of fandom - because it felt like a giant handwave for various plot elements from the Wizard of Oz, that the original writers probably never worried in the slightest bit about.

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

*facepalm*

I knew I was forgetting something... The asterisks are ones I've read more than once.

Honestly, I'm glad I read Wicked, because it was a lot like fandom--but I didn't really enjoy the book. I like parts of it, but it just didn't do it for me. I think part of it was I'd read a lot of the other Oz books when I was but a wee one, so i had all that added to my conception of the movie and the world already.

[pepper-field.livejournal.com]

Ah - it probably helped me, then, that I hadn't ever read the Oz books, and only barely remembered watching the film. I was never a big fan, I found it scary. :D

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

If you thought "Wizard of Oz" was scary, you probably would have hated "Return to Oz," which was WAY scarier and darker and awesome.

A lot of my friends were really really thrilled with "Wicked," so I'm sure that it's just me.

:-)

[knightedrogue.livejournal.com]

As much as Bill loved A People's History ... it's terribly one-sided. Zinn doesn't even TRY to write objectively, so it's one big pelt on coporate America and the upper class. I wouldn't stress about reading the whole thing.

You didn't like Dante? Holy crap, woman! You are no friend of mine ... :D

[holdouttrout.livejournal.com]

Eh. Dante just doen't get me excited. I'm sorry.

I like A People's History because it is a very different perspective. But I'm not stressing about not reading it all.

;-)