create a list of over 100 must-read books and read them

12. Gormghast Trilogy – my father gave this to me about 15 years ago, and I have yet to read it.
13. Antigone
14. Oedipus Cycle
15. the Lord of the Rings
16. the Fellowship of the Ring
17. the Two Towers – in whatever order they occur
18. Iliad
19. Odyssey
20. Metamorphoses
21. Plutarch
22. The Divine Comedy
23. The Koran
24. Chaucer’s Troilus and Cressida
25. Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
26. The Prince
27. Hobbes Leviathan
28. Paradise Lost
29. Paradise Regained
30. Moliere Tartuffe
31. Gulliver’s Travels (kind of a ringer; I read it in high school, a looooong time ago)
32. Stern Tristam Shandy
33. Thomas Paine
34. Northanger Abbey
35. Dickens Barnaby Rudge
36. Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit
37. Dickens Our Mutual Friend
38. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (my daughter says it’s good)
39. Eliot Middlemarch
40. Melville Billy Budd
41. Dostoevsky Brothers Karamazov (my father says the characters remind him of his two brothers and himself; I’ll see what that means)
42. Ibsen Peer Gynt
43. Tolstoy Anna Karenina
44. Tom Sawyer
45. Huckleberry Finn
46. James Portrait of a Lady
47. Nietsche Thus Spake Zarathustra
48. Shaw Pygmalion
49. Conrad Lord Jim
50. Chekhov Uncle Vanya
51. Cather
52. Kafka
53. eliot Wasteland
54. Wright Black Boy
55. Wright Native Son
56. Orwell 1984
57. Williams Glass Menagerie
58. Maugham
59. Atwood The Handmaiden’s Tale
60. Cummings The Enormous Room
61. Madam Bovary
62. Lorca
63. Hawking A Brief History of Time
64. History Play (a theory that Marlowe was actually Shakespeare)
65. Flannery O’Connor
66. Plath
67. Neruda
68. Candide
69. Robinson Crusoe
70. The Count of Monte Cristo
71. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
72. Kristin Lavrensdatter
73. Jude the Obscure
74. 100 Years of Solitude
75. Le Morte d’Arthur
76. The Duchess of Malfi
77. Volpone
78. Blake
79.Coleridge
80. The Vedas
81. The I Ching
82. The Book of Mormon
83. The Rubiat of Omar Kayham (sic)
84. The Thousand and One Nights
85. Rossetti
86. Wilde
87. Whitman
88. Balzac
89. The Time Machine
90. Lovecraft
91. Greene The Power and the Glory
92. Anais Nin
93. Alice Walker
94. Toni Morrison
95. Camus
96. A Passage to India
97. Satanic Verses
98. Watson The Double Helix
99. Lives of Cells
100. Mann The Magic Mountain

It is soooo hard to pick just a hundred. These are the “good” books. I might be able to choose a hundred “popcorn” books I would like to read.

I just got finished with a Shakespeare class – seven plays. Most were the usual “greatest hits” – Macbeth, Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet. We also did Lear and Othello. The ones I wasn’t familiar with were Anthony and Cleopatra and Titus Andronicus. I was particularly amazed by Titus. It is gory and icky, but somehow eerily fascinating. This is kind of a bittersweet time for me. I will likely never take a lit class again. I have my BA, I took the two classes that I need for my MEd. I really don’t like the level at which this uni presents lit – the class should have been called “Cinema of Shakespeare” and it was a 400/600 level class. bah. Now I am going to have to figure out lit on a personal level, rather than as a puzzle to be solved for a paper or project. Interesting times.

Plus in the past two weeks,I read Of Mice and Men FINALLY, and Ayn Rand’s Anthem – this I won’t be teaching to my 10th graders BORING.

Okay, so reading lists are busman’s holiday for me, yet I am compelled to read constantly – the back of the toilet paper, other people’s notes (this is okay, I am a teacher ;).

Done ranting. Not sure at what number I left off, so I will just add to my list:

Shakespeare’s sonnets: I have nibbled, but never supped
Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories and Problem Plays: I have read many, but by no means all
Ayn Rand: Reread the Fountainhead to figure out why my daughter is obsessed
T.S. Eliot
James Joyce: Ulysses was my grandmother’s favorite book
Dos Passos: Manhattan Transfer: I read a really cool biography about Dos Passos and Hemmingway. I was never fond of Papa, but after this book, I will never be able to read him with sympathy again.

I really need to get away from the English/American lit and start moving into authors in other genres and other parts of the world. Does anybody have suggestions for Mexican/South American writers? I have read some Marquez and Cisneros.

1. Tom Jones: Fielding
2. The Bible
3. Siddartha: Hesse
4. Les Mis (finish: Hugo
5. Don Quixote: Cervantes

That’s a start.