Massive Post of Post-y Goodness (Now With 50% More Classy Book Talk!)

[apple_pathways]

New friend (HELLO!) emmyangua has introduced me to 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die. (Link takes you to the Amazon listing for the book; to view a list of the works included, go here.)

Those of you who've been reading this journal for awhile and are familiar with my "I Like Making Lists" tag know what's coming: yes, I've composed a list of all the works I've read from the master list.

The list was posted, I believe, in (reverse) chronological order of publication. I have read 83 of the 1001 works listed, which is about 8.3% of the total. I'm going to make it a project to read more of the books on the list, so if you've scanned the list and want to rec anything from it, do share!

1. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
2. The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
3. House of Leaves – Mark Z. Danielewski
4. The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
5. The Hours – Michael Cunningham
6. Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
7. Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
8. Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg
9. Like Water for Chocolate – Laura Esquivel
10. Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
11. The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
12. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
13. Beloved – Toni Morrison
14. Contact – Carl Sagan
15. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
16. Neuromancer – William Gibson
17. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
18. Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
19. Breakfast of Champions – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
20. The Bluest Eye – Toni Morrison
21. Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
22. The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John Le Carré
23. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
24. Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
25. Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
26. To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
27. The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
28. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
29. The Story of O – Pauline Réage
30. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
31. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
32. The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
33. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
34. Animal Farm – George Orwell
35. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
36. Orlando – Virginia Woolf
37. Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
38. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd – Agatha Christie
39. The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
40. A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
41. Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
42. Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
43. Howards End – E.M. Forster
44. A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
45. The Jungle – Upton Sinclair
46. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
47. The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
48. Dracula – Bram Stoker
49. The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
50. The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
51. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
52. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
53. Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
54. Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
55. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
56. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
57. Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
58. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
59. Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
60. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
61. The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
62. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
63. The Purloined Letter – Edgar Allan Poe
64. The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
65. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
66. The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
67. Last of the Mohicans – James Fenimore Cooper
68. Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
69. Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
70. Persuasion – Jane Austen
71. Emma – Jane Austen
72. Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
73. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
74. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
75. The Mysteries of Udolpho – Ann Radcliffe
76. The Castle of Otranto – Horace Walpole
77. A Modest Proposal – Jonathan Swift
78. Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
79. Moll Flanders – Daniel Defoe
80. Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
81. The Thousand and One Nights – Anonymous
82. Metamorphoses – Ovid
83. Aesop’s Fables – Aesopus

I also have a meme going!

Day Four: Seven things that cross your mind a lot.


Oh jeez--it might be easier to list seven things I don't obsess about constantly, but here goes:

1. "Am I being an asshole?"
   
2. Religion and spirituality.
   
3. The internal logical consistency of my own thoughts and beliefs. (It's the hobgoblin of my little mind...)
   
4. "Is this a battle worth fighting?"
   
5. Sex and sexuality.
   
6. "Shouldn't I be doing more?"
   
7. "Where the hell are my keys???"
   

Finally: The Decemberists have a new album out in January and they are coming to Michigan in February! WOO HOO!!!

ETA: There's one more thing I wanted to include in this entry!

I've signed up for fandom_stocking, which is a really cute idea: people post their wishes for short fiction, icons, and other holiday greetings, and other fans fill their "stocking" with content. Here's a link to my stocking, which just went up today. I think I'm going to write a bunch of Doctor Who and Sherlock drabbles, and then skim through posts looking for requests that fit the bill.

I'm also experimenting with learning how to make graphics! So maybe people will get some not-quite-perfect but well-intentioned icons and such. :) Let me know if you sign up, so I can stuff your stocking! (I will never stop giggling about that...)

Comments

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the inclusion of all those Jane Austen novels really upped my total! ;) (As I said to someone else, though, I wouldn't place all of them on a list of must-read books.)

I read a fair amount of Sci-Fi as a teen, but I still need to read more.

The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho I both read for a lit/composition class built around Gothic literature; otherwise, I doubt I'd have heard of them!

Non-fiction is good stuff, too; it's what I always turn to when I can't decide which novel to read next. What sort of subjects do you like?

[jesterjoker.livejournal.com]

I read P&P once and need to again; it's one of my best friends's favorite books. Most of Austen's stuff I just blehhhh, though.

SF is my lifeblood. The more insane the more I like it. :D

Yep, that's where I heard about Otranto. I have a few others rec'd me by people aware of my gothicness, but I haven't got to reading them yet. I should.

I tend to go straight to the 19th century for nonfiction. It just fascinates me through and through, though when you realise what happened in the end, you have to distance yourself, or try to ignore the huge conflict that topped it.

I've read a few science books, but want to read more; they're just difficult to go through when I obtain them from the library. I'm also looking into travel books and things to give myself a broader glimpse of the world. I think my thing for city history fits in here - they're just big and huge and boggling.

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

P&P is really great! The social satire and the comedy of errors that take place are just top notch! Her other novels are harder to get into, but my favorites among them are Sense & Sensibility and Mansfield Park.

Anything you would rec in terms of 19th century non-fiction? I have a love of reference books, and I really enjoying looking through old medical texts. It's really amazing what used to count as "medicine", especially in re: to women!

I tend to be largely swayed by popular trends when it comes to non-fiction: Mary Roach, popular economics, Fast Food Nation, etc. I, too, need to read more hard science!

[jesterjoker.livejournal.com]

I tried Sense & Sensibility, bleh. Never tried Mansfield Park yet. Northanger Abbey (Austen, right?) was pretty amusing, being a goth crazy.

Oh man. I think of the "forehead phrenology" stuff I learned about when I read Jane Eyre. What the bog, right?

The two that come to my mind are The Guns of August and The Proud Tower. The latter is more straight 19th century, but I tend to associate the Great War with the 19th, just because it... fits, in a broad historical sense. I'm a nerd. :)

I'm reading, occasionally, David Clay Large's "Berlin" book that covers the history of the city from 1871 to 2000 or so. It's dense and fascinating. Difficult reading sometimes, but that's to be kind of expected for one of the bigger flashpoints in the 20th century.

I'm eyeing some Indian history set in the Raj, and if I could find more fiction that doesn't always sound so... /dull/... I would love to give that a try, too. I doubt much of that will be easy readings, either. Deep dense stuff.

Mary Roach is on the "why haven't I read her yet!?" list. :D

[apple-pathways.livejournal.com]

If you didn't like S&S, I doubt Mansfield Park will grab you! I enjoyed Northanger Abbey a lot, but P&P is definitely Austen's masterpiece.

Have you read House of Leaves by Mark Danielewski? It's a lot of work to read, but it's worth it. The story is fascinating, and the storytelling extremely unique. It also has elements of science fiction and horror to it.

Do read Mary Roach! She's hilarious. I would start with Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers.

[jesterjoker.livejournal.com]

House of Leaves's WAY up my alley. I got to finally read it.

I will get to Mary Roach. I could use something silly.