read the classics

So last night, before I went to the bar with my friends, I stopped at the new and used book store. I brought a list with 3 of the “classics” I randomly selected. The one I was really hoping for, Gravity’s Rainbow, wasn’t there. But that same author has another book on the list, The Crying of Lot 49, and that WAS there. And honestly, the cover says “A bizarre, saturnalian plunge into the underground. A streamlined doomsday machine.” How can anyone resist that blurb? I had to look up saturnalian. It means “Of unrestrained and intemperate jollity; riotously merry”. Jeez, I learned something just reading the blurb on the cover. Already, I’m a more knowledgeable person.
I also happened to see a book called Glimmer, about an 18 year old girl who lost her mom, and is in her first year of college and has a kind of nervous breakdown. Just from the little bit I skimmed through at the store, I knew I’d love it. So I grabbed that too. Next step… start reading.

Yes, it’s Saturday night. I don’t care. I have a fresh burst of inspiration, and I’m going to act on it. I picked 3 titles off the list, and I’m going to see if I can pick up at least one of them at the new & used book store. I’m hoping they have Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. I have no idea what it’s about, but I dig the title. To the bookstore!

Maybe it’s because of school and all the associated homework, or maybe it’s because I’m lazy, but I just haven’t found the time to build my list. Time to hit google.
Interesting find: www.literature.org has some classics that you can read online. Copyright must have expired or whatever. But not quite what I’m looking for. I want a list. I prefer to read books made on the backs of dead trees. I’m sick that way.

OK, Here’s my list, taken straight from Time Magazine. I don’t feel super happy having the biggest media conglomerate on earth tell me what I should read, but it’s still a start. Without further ado:
The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow

All the King’s Men
Robert Penn Warren

American Pastoral
Philip Roth

An American Tragedy
Theodore Dreiser

Animal Farm
George Orwell

Appointment in Samarra
John O’Hara

Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret
Judy Blume

The Assistant
Bernard Malamud

At Swim-Two-Birds
Flann O’Brien

Atonement
Ian McEwan

Beloved
Toni Morrison

The Berlin Stories
Christopher Isherwood

The Big Sleep
Raymond Chandler

The Blind Assassin
Margaret Atwood

Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy

Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh

The Bridge of San Luis Rey
Thornton Wilder

Call It Sleep
Henry Roth

Catch-22
Joseph Heller

The Catcher in the Rye
J.D. Salinger

A Clockwork Orange
Anthony Burgess

The Confessions of Nat Turner
William Styron
]
The Corrections
Jonathan Franzen

The Crying of Lot 49
Thomas Pynchon

A Dance to the Music of Time
Anthony Powell

The Day of the Locust
Nathanael West

Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather

A Death in the Family
James Agee

The Death of the Heart
Elizabeth Bowen

Deliverance
James Dickey

Dog Soldiers
Robert Stone

Falconer
John Cheever

The French Lieutenant’s Woman
John Fowles

The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing

Go Tell it on the Mountain
James Baldwin

Gone With the Wind
Margaret Mitchell

The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck

Gravity’s Rainbow
Thomas Pynchon

The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald

A Handful of Dust
Evelyn Waugh

The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter
Carson McCullers

The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene

Herzog
Saul Bellow

Housekeeping
Marilynne Robinson

A House for Mr. Biswas
V.S. Naipaul

I, Claudius
Robert Graves

Infinite Jest
David Foster Wallace

Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison

Light in August
William Faulkner

The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe
C.S. Lewis

Lolita
Vladimir Nabokov

Lord of the Flies
William Golding

The Lord of the Rings
J.R.R. Tolkien

Loving
Henry Green

Lucky Jim
Kingsley Amis

The Man Who Loved Children
Christina Stead

Midnight’s Children
Salman Rushdie

Money
Martin Amis

The Moviegoer
Walker Percy

Mrs. Dalloway
Virginia Woolf

Naked Lunch
William Burroughs

Native Son
Richard Wright

Neuromancer
William Gibson

Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro

1984
George Orwell

On the Road
Jack Kerouac

One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Ken Kesey

The Painted Bird
Jerzy Kosinski

Pale Fire
Vladimir Nabokov

A Passage to India
E.M. Forster

Play It As It Lays
Joan Didion

Portnoy’s Complaint
Philip Roth

Possession
A.S. Byatt

The Power and the Glory
Graham Greene

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark

Rabbit, Run
John Updike

Ragtime
E.L. Doctorow

The Recognitions
William Gaddis

Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett

Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates

The Sheltering Sky
Paul Bowles

Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson

The Sot-Weed Factor
John Barth

The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner

The Sportswriter
Richard Ford

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold
John le Carre

The Sun Also Rises
Ernest Hemingway

Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston

Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe

To Kill a Mockingbird
Harper Lee

To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf

Tropic of Cancer
Henry Miller

Ubik
Philip K. Dick

Under the Net
Iris Murdoch

Under the Volcano
Malcolm Lowry

Watchmen
Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons

White Noise
Don DeLillo

White Teeth
Zadie Smith

Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys

What are “the classics”? For me, it’s stuff like Great Expectations, Of Mice and Men, Robinson Crusoe, A Tale of Two Cities, 1984, Animal Farm, The Great Gatsby, and others. I’ve read a bunch of the books just named, but I can do better. I go to Bookman’s almost every week, so that’s where I’ll buy “The classics”. I just have to create a very precise definition before I can tell if I’m making progress. This weekends I shall begin compiling my list of classics!