Here is the list I'll be working from, courtesy of Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time. I've read 22 of them already. I reserve the right to either re-read or skip. The ones I've already read are marked with an * and bold and will updated as I read them.
1. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
3. Ulysses by James Joyce
4. In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
5. The Brothers Karamazov by Feodor Dostoevsky
6. Moby Dick by Herman Melville
7. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert*
8. Middlemarch by George Eliot* (finished 11/1/2009)
9. The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
10. The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu
11. Emma by Jane Austen*
12. Bleak House by Charles Dickens
13. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy*
14. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain*
15. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
16. Great Expectations by Charles Dickens*
17. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
18. The Ambassadors by Henry James
19. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
20. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald*
21. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf
22. Crime and Punishment Feodor Dostoevesky
23. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
24. Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray*
25. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
26. Finnegans Wake by James Joyce
27. The Man without Qualities by Robert Musil
28. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
29. The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
30. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
31. The Red and the Black by Stendhal
32. Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
33. Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
34. Tess of the D'Ubervilles by Thomas Hardy*
35. Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann
36. Le Pere Goriot by Honore de Balzac
37. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce*
38. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte*
39. The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
40. Mollow; Malone Dies; The Unnamable by Samuel Beckett
41. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen*
42. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne*
43. Fathers and Sons by Ivan Turgenev
44. Nostromo by Joseph Conrad
45. Beloved by Toni Morrison
46. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
47. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov*
48. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
49. Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
50. Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xuequin
51. The Trial by Franz Kafka
52. Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte*
53. The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
54. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
55. Petersburg by Andrey Bely
56. Things Fall Apart by Chinue Achebe
57. The Princess of Cleves by Madame de Lafayette
58. The Stranger by Albert Camus
59. My Antonia by Willa Cather (finished 11/23/09)
60. The Counterfeiters by Andre Gide
61. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton*
62. The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford
63. The Awakening by Kate Chopin*
64. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
65. Herzog by Saul Bellow
66. Germinal by Emile Zola
67. Call it Sleep by Henry Roth
68. U.S.A. Trilogy by John Dos Passos
69. Hunger by Knut Hamsun
70. Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doblin
71. Cities of Salt by Abd al-Rahman Munif
72. The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carloes Fuentes
73. A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
74. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh* (finished summer 2010)
75. The Last Chronicle of Barset by Anthony Trollope
76. The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens
77. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
78. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
79. Candide by Voltaire
80. Native Son by Richard Wright
81. Under the Volcano by Malcolm Lowry
82. Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
83. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston*
84. Waverley by Sir Walter Scott
85. Snow Country by Kawabata Yasunari
86. Nineteen Eight-Four by George Orwell*
87. The Betrothed by Alessandro Manzoni
88. The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper
89. Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
90. Les Miserables by Victor Hugo*
91. On the Road by Jack Keurouac
92. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley*
93. The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
94. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger*
95. The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins
96. The Good Soldier Svejk by Jaroslav Hasek
97. Dracula by Bram Stoker*
98. The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
99. The Hound of Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
100. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell* (finished 2010)
Saturday, September 26, 2009
The Beginning
My new project.
I started the old 9 to 5 a few weeks ago. My first foray into full-time employment has come with a number of consequences. These include being too tired to cook after work, too tired to go out after work, too tired to go to the gym after work...you get the picture. What I'm not too tired to do, however, is sit. Sit and read. The two go hand in hand.
I'm a big reader. When I was younger, I'd spend hours and hours reading books while my sisters played with their Barbies. In high school, I read every book assigned in English class. No Cliff's Notes for me. In college I was an English major, much to my Mom's chagrin, and I got to read a little bit of everything from Chaucer to Dickens to Austen to Shakespeare to Amy Tan to T.C. Boyle to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Neil LaBute. When I started law school, you're welcome Mom, the fiction fell to the wayside and was replaced by casebooks and outlines. Now that I'm starting my career at a relatively low pressure firm which lets me work normal working hours I have time again to go back to my old favorite pasttime.
Loving to read doesn't mean I'm good at picking out books to read. I read the fun stuff (Twilights, Harry Potters, The Southern Vampire novels). I read the old stuff (Age of Innocence, Persuasion, Les Miserables). Now I'm trying to read the good stuff. So in an attempt to get a well-rounded selection of books that are worth reading, I'm looking to Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time to give it to me.
I decided I'm going to read my way through The Novel 100 because I realize that even though I'm an avid reader many of the classics, both old and new, have eluded me. I tend to read Victorian literature, novels about girls looking to marry and the men who take advantage of them. Lacking in my reading history are the great adventure novels, the novels about war and morality, the novels I just haven't heard of. So this is me remedying these omissions.
I picked this particular list because it seems to be the most well-rounded. Times list of Top 100 Novels only goes back to 1923. The Guardian's list is too British. This list contains most of the books on these lists and other top 100 novels lists I've perused.
I won't go in order and I won't give myself a set time period to accomplish this. Realistically, I know I can't read 100 books in one year, so I'll give myself however long it takes. Here I go. Read along with or read my thoughts or do both. I'll just be here, reading and thinking.
I started the old 9 to 5 a few weeks ago. My first foray into full-time employment has come with a number of consequences. These include being too tired to cook after work, too tired to go out after work, too tired to go to the gym after work...you get the picture. What I'm not too tired to do, however, is sit. Sit and read. The two go hand in hand.
I'm a big reader. When I was younger, I'd spend hours and hours reading books while my sisters played with their Barbies. In high school, I read every book assigned in English class. No Cliff's Notes for me. In college I was an English major, much to my Mom's chagrin, and I got to read a little bit of everything from Chaucer to Dickens to Austen to Shakespeare to Amy Tan to T.C. Boyle to Nathaniel Hawthorne to Neil LaBute. When I started law school, you're welcome Mom, the fiction fell to the wayside and was replaced by casebooks and outlines. Now that I'm starting my career at a relatively low pressure firm which lets me work normal working hours I have time again to go back to my old favorite pasttime.
Loving to read doesn't mean I'm good at picking out books to read. I read the fun stuff (Twilights, Harry Potters, The Southern Vampire novels). I read the old stuff (Age of Innocence, Persuasion, Les Miserables). Now I'm trying to read the good stuff. So in an attempt to get a well-rounded selection of books that are worth reading, I'm looking to Daniel S. Burt's The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time to give it to me.
I decided I'm going to read my way through The Novel 100 because I realize that even though I'm an avid reader many of the classics, both old and new, have eluded me. I tend to read Victorian literature, novels about girls looking to marry and the men who take advantage of them. Lacking in my reading history are the great adventure novels, the novels about war and morality, the novels I just haven't heard of. So this is me remedying these omissions.
I picked this particular list because it seems to be the most well-rounded. Times list of Top 100 Novels only goes back to 1923. The Guardian's list is too British. This list contains most of the books on these lists and other top 100 novels lists I've perused.
I won't go in order and I won't give myself a set time period to accomplish this. Realistically, I know I can't read 100 books in one year, so I'll give myself however long it takes. Here I go. Read along with or read my thoughts or do both. I'll just be here, reading and thinking.
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