Book Meme

[hobgoblinn]

Yeah, Okay. I'll bite. Here's my list. Stuff I've read is bolded. Stuff I want to read is underlined. Stuff I read but couldn't finish is italicized and stuff I didn't like is strike through. ETA - I'm told * are for read more than once. I'll count those Started more than once, as well.

I can see a lot of stuff I never would have read but for class, mostly in high school. Also, it's got to really leave an impression for me to hate a book. I might give up on it, but that's a very different thing.

I've been trying lately to get myself to a place where I can read and get through James Joyce. As a concept his writing sounds fascinating-- using images and ideas almost like musical themes that recombine later in unexpected ways. But even though I can sometimes (with help) glimpse the structure, I can't muster the effort necessary to persevere. Maybe I need to find a lj community devoted to reading Joyce or something. Given the insanity in the world at large, there's doubtless such a group out here.

Scary how many of these I have never even heard of, too....

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrel
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One hundred years of solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion*
Life of Pi: a novel
The name of the rose
Don Quixote*
Moby Dick*
Ulysses*
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre*
A Tale of Two Cities*
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs and Steel: the fates of human societies
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
Love in the time of cholera
Brave new world
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A clockwork orange
Anansi boys
The once and future king*
The grapes of wrath
The Poisonwood Bible: a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The 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
Gulliver’s Travels
Les miserables
The corrections
The amazing adventures of Kavalier and Cay
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
A confederacy of dunces
A short history of nearly everything
Dubliners*
The unbearable lightness of being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five*
The scarlet letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake: a novel
Collapse: how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
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
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit*
In Cold Blood: a true account of a mulitiple murder and it’s consequences
White teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Comments

[emelye-miller.livejournal.com]

I've learned that reading Joyce is a lot like listening to Debussy or seeing the picture in one of those Magic-Eye things - you sort of have to relax your mind and just take it in. The prose works more on your subconscious - the collection of words sort of forms images in your mind. Don't work at it, just try and savor it.

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Though that way lies overdue books and library fines, methinks.

I did find a guidebook helpful, and drinking guinness while reading. So relaxation-- there's probably something to that.

Though as a writer myself I have a hard time seeing how someone can write to the subconscious, consciously. I certainly can't do it....

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

I hope you don't mind I friended you - I think we have a lot of reading/writing tastes in common. Also, you are writing Giles/Ethan/Willow, which made me sit up in interest all on its own.

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

Hey thanks-- I'll friend you back. I'm currently finishing up a Harry Potter thing that's been eating at me, and hopefully it's stretching me enough to get back to the other piece. Something about sticking through to the ending is really hard for me. Especially when, as here, I don't feel I have quite a handle on the material yet.

Looking forward to getting to know you better.

Hob

[sahiya.livejournal.com]

Endings are really the hardest part, I think. I've had an awful time with the story I'm posting right now - it was just stuck for the longest time (like over a year) because I didn't know how to end it. Sometimes I think a time crunch, as unpleasant as it is, is really the best thing for finding the right ending. I was sure what to do about the ending for my summer_of_giles story either, but I had to figure it out and fast, so I did. Whereas with this one nothing was making me so I twiddled my thumbs and angsted about and avoided opening the file.

Anyway. Yes. Endings suck. That was the point of this.

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

I'll vouch for sahiya! She's great fun, and she's not an axe murderer anymore :)

[tx-cronopio.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I'll second 100 years of solitude. Definitely a must!

[hobgoblinn.livejournal.com]

I'll have to de-friend her immediately, in that case. I've always wanted to get axe murdered. At least, that's the only explanation I can come up with for my unaccountable attraction to my ex. (Who, in my defense, was not always an axe murderer....)

She's a heck of a beta too, when she's not off gallivanting all over Europe. But I'm glad my betas have real lives, and it makes me appreciate them all the more.