(no subject)

[zwol]

I couldn't leave well enough alone: I had to redo the books meme with the categories I wanted. Behind the cut, since I don't want to spam everyone's friends pages with nearly the same content twice. However, for additional incentive to read it, there are explanatory anecdotes in there now!

Read all the way through and would recommend wholeheartedly

Anansi Boys
Brave New World
Dracula
Foucault’s Pendulum
Frankenstein
Gulliver’s Travels
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Neverwhere
1984
Pride and Prejudice
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Count of Monte Cristo
The Hobbit
The Iliad
The Name of the Rose
The Odyssey
The Three Musketeers
Watership Down
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values

I realize some of these will not be to everyone's tastes. These are the books on this list that, having read myself, I think everyone should at least attempt to read.

Read all the way through and might recommend but not to everyone

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
American Gods
Anna Karenina
Cryptonomicon
Moby Dick
Quicksilver
The Confusion
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Prince
The Silmarillion
Wuthering Heights

Whereas these books are more likely to be unsuitable for any given reader, and so I am more cautious in my recommendations.

Yes, I really did read A People's History of the United States because it was assigned for a class: 11th grade US history. The teacher gave us parallel readings from that, a generic survey textbook, and Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition throughout the entire course, in order to demonstrate that secondary sources have agendas. This is still on my list of best pedagogical tactics ever, although I suspect it could go horribly wrong.

Read all the way through but would not recommend

David Copperfield
Dune
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Great Expectations
Oliver Twist
Sense and Sensibility
The Scarlet Letter
The Tale of Two Cities
Treasure Island

Man, there's a lot of Charles Dickens in this set. I think this is more to do with my having been required to read them for junior high school English, than the actual quality of the books. I read Bleak House for fun and liked it, after all. Also, if there were any Jack London on this list it'd be in here too, for the same reason.

Dune and Treasure Island are in this set despite my having enjoyed them quite a lot at the time, because they're like Heinlein: good if you're a pubescent boy, not so much otherwise. I don't know any pubescent boys anymore, so.

The only thing wrong with Sense and Sensibility is that it's not sufficiently different from Pride and Prejudice, which is a much better book.

Freakonomics suffers from being a popularization of a science I know something about, and thus I can see the oversimplifications and they irritate me.

Started and mean to finish someday

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Crime and Punishment
Don Quixote
Gravity’s Rainbow
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
Les Misérables
Lolita
On the Road
One Hundred Years of Solitude
The Canterbury Tales
The Grapes of Wrath
The Once and Future King
The Satanic Verses

This group also includes books that I think I read all the way through but don't remember well enough to be sure, so clearly I have to read them again.

I also might recommend these, but not to everyone, because if I intend to finish a book, I generally think other people might get something out of it too — but there's often a reason why I got stuck on it, and other people might have the same problem.

There's a funny story about why I never finished Les Misérables. I read all the way through the first half of a two-volume edition which I found in the public library — except that the second half was checked out so I didn't realize it was a two-volume edition. The first half ended right after the big confrontation in Paris between the Thénardiers and Jean Valjean, and that seemed like a perfectly good ending for the book, so it didn't occur to me to look for another volume. I was then very, very surprised when I saw the musical a few years later.

Started and gave up on

The Aeneid
The Catcher in the Rye
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
To the Lighthouse
Vanity Fair

Most of these have the same problem: the characters are neither sympathetic nor sufficiently interesting to make up for it. I'm very picky about what books with unsympathetic casts I will read.

Mean to read someday

A Clockwork Orange
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Catch-22
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Dubliners
Emma
Jane Eyre
Love in the Time of Cholera
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Northanger Abbey
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Persuasion
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Slaughterhouse-five
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Brothers Karamazov
The God of Small Things
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Kite Runner
Ulysses
War and Peace
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West

Despite having written Sense and Sensibility off above, I really like Jane Austen.

I have bounced off Gregory Maguire before, but I love the concept behind Wicked so much that I'm willing to give him another try.

Have no desire to read

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Madame Bovary
Mrs Dalloway
Oryx and Crake : a novel
The Fountainhead
The Mists of Avalon
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For all books in this set, either I gave up on a book by the same author, or I have heard things that make me believe I'll hate it.

Never heard of

A Confederacy of Dunces
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
Angels & Demons
Beloved
Cloud Atlas
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
Life of Pi
Middlesex
The Blind Assassin
The Corrections
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Historian : a novel
The Sound and the Fury
The Time Traveler’s Wife
White Teeth

Capsule reviews encouraged ;-)

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Beloved is not the Toni Morrison book I'd recommend you start with if you're interested in Toni Morrison. I'd recommend Sula instead. I was assigned it for my college creative writing class and thought I'd read a few chapters in the gap between dinner and the beginning of a party Saturday night. I was not particularly interested. And I ended up reading it through the beginning of the party until I was finished with it, including the stereotypical, "Shut up. I'm reading," responses to other partygoers.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is an interesting conceit (narrator is autistic), but I liked what Elizabeth Moon did with the same narrative conceit in The Speed of Dark better.

Encouragement received!

[(Anonymous)]

When I applied to work for Cody's, they gave me a quiz to ensure I had a general knowledge of books. I wish I had a copy. "Name four books by Twain" and "who wrote 'Poisonwood Bible'" were probably on there. In any case, I ended up being the kind of person who knew that the customer meant Gladwell's "Tipping Point" (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/nb/nb.cgi/view/weblog/2002/08/13/0). So I am slightly dismayed at how many books here I don't have a glib trailer for.

Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood" is a procedural sort of murder story. Why did these men kill this family? What did it take to track them down? Ghastly and direct. Ten years ago I read it and liked it.

Note from my blog a few years ago: When I think about the word "clutter," I think that I like the sound of the word, and that I like "decluttering" as well. But then I remember that the Clutter family was the Midwestern clan whose murder formed the premise of Capote's book "In Cold Blood." And then talk of joyous decluttering seems in bad taste.

Five years ago, when I read Haddon's "Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time", I specifically wanted to lend it to you (http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~sumanah/cgi-bin/nb/nb.cgi/view/weblog/2003/05). Unreliable narrator a la "Flowers for Algernon" but autistic. The protagonist decides to put on a Holmes hat to figure something out, but isn't prepared for what he finds out. But he's brave about it, in the end.

-Sumana

In Cold Blood

[(Anonymous)]

The only one of your 'never heard of' list I have read is In Cold Blood. Summary: About a mass murder in 1959 Kansas. An entire family, respected farmers known and loved in their community, are methodologically killed by shotgun blasts, seemingly without motive (no rape, no robbery, no grudges, nothing) and with no suspects. I found Capote's coverage of the murder and investigation gripping and the many interviews with family and townspeople made the whole thing feel very real and immediate. I highly recommend it.

The same person who gave me In Cold Blood also gave me The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and told me it was also excellent, but I have not yet gotten to reading it.

-Jack

[falsedrow.livejournal.com]

Cloud Atlas is one of those popular fiction books I bought because Amazon recommended it to me and I wanted to see what people were apparently reading. Not sure what to say. It's what I classify as Fiction with a capital F, meaning more literary than novel, which does not do much for me. I got Special Topics in Calamity Physics the same way, which was much better.

I think I bought Time Traveler's Wife in an airport. Definitely one of the better books I've picked up for a plane ride; it made me cry (on LJ, as I recall). I do recommend it.

I listened to Slaughterhouse-Five in the gym over several months. Probably a good way to experience it. Not sure that I recommend it.

I liked the book of Memoirs of a Geisha very much.

I read Once and Future King while taking the Iowas (standardized tests). We weren't supposed to have books. But it was third or fourth grade, and I was reading T H White, so the teacher figured it was better to just let me alone. Not as good as your Les Mis story...

Capsule summaries!

[elisaana.livejournal.com]

Life of Pi: Zookeeper's son lost at sea with ferocious tiger; philosophy ensues. (Very good!)

Middlesex: Girl finds out she's not. (Very engaging!)

The Blind Assassin: Reminiscent of Agatha Christie or The Beekeeper's Apprentice. (I enjoyed it; Margaret Atwood, in a much different tone than The Handmaid's Tale, which I'm guessing is the one of hers you disliked, since you put The Oryx and the Crake into the won't read category (I haven't read that one). I can't remember much except for spoilers and that there were a lot of interesting figures of speech, either invented or old-time Canadian.)

Curious Incident...: As Mrissa said, interesting idea, but I wasn't enthralled.

White Teeth: Aiming for social criticism of modern England on 5 different topics at once, but it didn't tie up in a good enough way to justify the buzz. Some of the insights along the way were interesting, but overall the depth-of-insight to page count ratio was too low.

I've heard raves about Cloud Atlas and The Time Traveler's Wife, so they're on my "eventually" list.

[(Anonymous)]

Thank you for the entry - I am going to recommend it as an example how this kind of list might be even more fun to read (in hope that at least one person would care enough to post this your way!)

I am kind of baffled by your "never heard of" list.

I have read 6 of the last category. I was too young and read it in translation in case of "In Cold Blood", so I would not say anything about that. Strangely enough - while I enjoyed most "Angela’s Ashes" (I often love the misery memoirs genre!) and enjoyed feeling both contempt and jealousy during reading "The Historian", I would not recommend those books to a stranger. I WOULD recommend "Beloved" (and there is a quote from it I have used at least once during every winter after reading the book - the one about color hunger during the bleak season)

[packbat.livejournal.com]

I, unfortunately, have read nothing on your "never heard of" list. Beloved is on my "have no desire to read" list, however, based on my mom's review.

I read Catch-22 and was underwhelmed. I read Slaugherhouse-Five and loved it. And I enjoyed A Tale of Two Cities, but haven't read it for a while.