(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 ;-)