Tuesday, September 23, 2008

More Books I Have Or Haven't Read

Jezebel just released a list of 75 Books Every Woman Should Read, in response to Esquire's 75 Books Every Man Should Read.

How many have I read? Let's see...

(Like we did for The Big Read list, the books I've read are in bold.)

First, the ladies:
  • The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
  • To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  • The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  • White Teeth, Zadie Smith
  • The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende
  • Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
  • Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
  • The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
  • Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  • The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
  • Beloved, Toni Morrison
  • Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
  • Like Life, Lorrie Moore
  • Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
  • Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë
  • The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
  • A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
  • A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor
  • The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
  • You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
  • Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
  • To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
  • Fear of Flying, Erica Jong (this book is perpetually checked out of every library I go to!)
  • Earthly Paradise, Colette
  • Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
  • Property, Valerie Martin
  • Middlemarch, George Eliot
  • Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid (for a moment I thought "yes," but then realized I was confusing it with Katie John)
  • The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir
  • Runaway, Alice Munro
  • The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  • The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
  • Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë
  • You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
  • Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
  • Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
  • The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
  • I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
  • A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith
  • And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
  • Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
  • The Secret History, Donna Tartt
  • The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
  • The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
  • The Group, Mary McCarthy
  • Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
  • The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
  • The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank
  • Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
  • Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
  • In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
  • The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck
  • Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
  • Three Junes, Julia Glass
  • A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
  • Sophie's Choice, William Styron
  • Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
  • Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
  • Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell
  • The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
  • The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
  • The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
  • The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
  • My Antonia, Willa Cather
  • Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
  • Spending, Mary Gordon
  • The Lover, Marguerite Duras
  • The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
  • Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
  • Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
  • Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
  • Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
  • I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith
  • Possession, A.S. Byatt
15 out of 75. Not good.

Now the gents (sorry about the hyperlinks; the list came that way):

The Adventures of Augie March, by Saul Bellow
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain - YES
Affliction, by Russell Banks
All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren
American Pastoral, by Philip Roth
American Tabloid, by James Ellroy
Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner
As I Lay Dying: The Corrected Text, by William Faulkner - YES (was my text "corrected?" I don't know...)
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
Blood Meridian, Or, the Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
The Brothers Karamazov: A Novel in Four Parts With Epilogue, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Call of the Wild, White Fang, & To Build a Fire, by Jack London
Civilwarland in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella, by George Saunders
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett
The Crack-Up, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Deliverance, by James Dickey
Dharma Bums, by Jack Kerouac
Dispatches, by Michael Herr
Dog Soldiers, Robert Stone
Dubliners, by James Joyce
A Fan’s Notes: A Fictional Memoir, by Frederick Exley
For Whom the Bell Tolls, by Ernest Hemingway
Going Native, by Stephen Wright
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, by Flannery O'Connor
The Good War: An Oral History of World War II, by Studs Terkel
The Grapes of Wrath: John Steinbeck Centennial Edition (1902-2002), by John Steinbeck
Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad
Hell’s Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, by Hunter S. Thompson
Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, by Jorge Luis Borges
Legends of the Fall, Jim Harrison
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: Three Tenant Families, by James Agee
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov - YES
Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry
Lucky Jim, Kingsley Amis
Master and Commander, by Patrick O'Brian
Midnight’s Children, by Salman Rushdie - YES
Moby Dick, by Herman Melville
The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
Native Son, by Richard Wright
One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, by Ken Kesey - YES
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf
The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
The Power and the Glory, by Graham Greene
The Professional, by W. C. Heinz
Rabbit Run, by John Updike
Revolutionary Road, Richard Yates
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley, by John McPhee
The Shining, by Stephen King
Slaughterhouse-five, by Kurt Vonnegut
So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell
Sophie’s Choice, by William Styron - YES
A Sport And a Pastime, James Salter
The Sportswriter, by Richard Ford
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, by John Le Carré
The Stories of John Cheever, by John Cheever
The Things They Carried: A Work of Fiction, Tim O'Brien - YES
This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, by Tobias Wolff
Time’s Arrow: Or the Nature of the Offense, by Martin Amis
Tropic of Cancer, by Henry Miller
Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
Underworld, by Don DeLillo
War And Peace, by Leo Tolstoy - YES
What It Takes: The Way to the White House, by Richard Ben Cramer
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: Stories, by Raymond Carver
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, by Haruki Murakami
Winesburg, Ohio, by Sherwood Anderson
Winter’s Bone: A Novel, Daniel Woodrell
Winter’s Tale, by Mark Helprin
Women, by Charles Bukowski

8 out of 75. Even worse.

Oh, and the only book on both lists is Sophie's Choice. Interesting. I tend to share Gloria Steinem's view on Sophie's Choice: "On an enormous canvas of concentration camps, human suffering, child murder, and insanity, the author has painted a portrait of a white southern sex-obsessed young writer who finally succeeds in losing his virginity."

Movie's pretty good, though. ^__^

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