Stealing memes

Lucy, who blogs A Commonplace Book and writes thoughtful posts on many subjects (nearly all of them insightful), recently stole a meme from an anonymous blog so she could post and while the time away as she waited for a meeting to begin. Having little in the way of scruples, I’ve decided the steal the meme from her. Why? Because I can’t think of anything profound to write about and if I’m going to bore you, I might as well look like I’m well-read. Or something.

Anyhoo, here’s how it works. Copy the list of books, then bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish. Like Lucy, I’m adding commentary because it’s just more fun that way. At the end, I’ll list a few of my beloved old favorites which aren’t famous, would never make anyone’s list but my own, and which I recommend as a great read any old day.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (This was a good book as far as I got, but it weighs about six pounds and holding it up to read hurt my hands.)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 (I think everyone but me has read this book.)
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights (this one too)
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel (I gave this one to a friend to read before I’d finished it and never got it back)
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses (Lucy says Joyce is effing incomprehensible. I totally agree. I slogged through three chapters and decided I needed to rest and recuperate. The book’s still waiting for me.)
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice (Another Great Book my English teachers didn’t assign and so I’ve never read)

Jane Eyre (this one too)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov

Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin

The Kite Runner

Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West

The Canterbury Tales

The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I’ve heard bits of this read as a book on tape, and I liked it but I’m afraid of Joyce now)
Love in the Time of Cholera

Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula (of course I've read this, but for some reason, Blogger won't bold it)
A Clockwork Orange

Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible

1984 (should have been 2004, eh?)
Angels & Demons

Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

To the Lighthouse

Tess of the D’Urbervilles

Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune

The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things

A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere (I love this title. I’d better read the book.)
A Confederacy of Dunces (this is about the Bush administration, right?)
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five (Missed out on this one too when everyone else was reading it)
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves (does it count if I want to read this one?)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake

Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas (I loved this one. It’s seriously strange and beautiful)
The Confusion
Lolita

Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything (this sounds like it would make my head ache)
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit (In a hole, in the ground, there lived a hobbit … yessssss.)
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

And some of my own old favorites, read over and over:

The Stand (say what you like about Steven King – this was an incredible plot and some of the most well-written characters I’ve ever met in a book)

A Gift Upon the Shore (by M.K. Wren. A great and gentle story about what comes after nuclear winter, the value of books, and the danger of fanaticism.)

Always Coming Home (by Ursula K. LeGuin. This is a fascinating, lyrical and indescribable future-history of a tribe of California natives.)

Reading in the Dark (by Seamus Deane)

Del Corso’s Gallery (by Phillip Caputo)

The English Patient (by Michael Ondaatje. One of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. The writing is sublime, the story compelling.)

The Lord of the Rings (Tolkein, of course)

Something Wicked This Way Comes (By Ray Bradbury)

To Kill a Mockingbird (by Harper Lee. I know this one is on lots of reading lists, but it was never assigned to me in school. I read it out of curiosity and loved it.)

Feel free to steal this meme – it’s gotta be a trend, now.