not what i intended to write about
i have a blog post simmering in my head, based on my somewhat yearly re-read of sheri tepper’s gibbon’s decline and fall. the basic contours are ruminations that the current wave of religious zealotry may be a frightened response to an increasingly complex (albeit better-understood than 250 years ago) world. i don’t know how much further i will get than that, so in the meantime, i offer up alejna’s unread book meme/not meme.
according to alejna (and you should read the provenance of the meme over at her blog; it’s interesting – the top 106 unread books at LibraryThing):
Bold what you have read, italicize your did not finishes, strikethrough the
ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf.
i’m probably going to add editoral comments [in brackets].
so, continue below the fold for my reads of the unread (as opposed to deads of the undead)… and i apologize for the order in which the books are listed. they are not alphabetized, sorted by author, date of publication, or anything logical i can discern. unless it’s the most-unread to the least-unread (or vice versa), but that would be wholly subjective. and subject to change without notice.
Jonathan Strange & M. Norrell [never heard of it]
Anna Karenina [something about a train, right?]
Crime and Punishment [although i did not finish it, i did write a 12th grade paper on it. and got an A. thank you, mr. segedy, even if you gave me a D on a later essay. see below.]
* Catch-22 [milo minderbinder's egg-selling math does work, and it took me the better part of half an hour to bend my brain around it. ouch!]
*+ One hundred years of solitude [do you remember the first time you saw ice?]
Wuthering Heights [but i saw the monty python flag semaphore version!]
The Silmarillion [got it either from my aunt or my grandmother - it was destined for the rubbish bin - and i forced myself to read the whole thing in 9th grade. mistake. killed tolkien for me forever. shoulda let it get thrown out.]
Life of Pi: a novel
The Name of the Rose [saw the movie first, so i'm not sure if it counts. christian slater, yum!]
*+ Don Quixote [in spanish, no less - took a whole class devoted to it in college: "don quixote and the emergence of the modern novel." my copies (because you know it's two books, right?) are annotated. amazing how much the language has changed.]
Moby Dick [i was born in new england. i went to college in new england. reading it was practically a life requirement.]
+ Ulysses
Madame Bovary [according to tom lehrer, it's somewhat racy, yes? and yet, i've never read it. oh, no, wait. just read the lyrics. lady chatterly, not madame bovary. honest mistake.]
+ The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
+ Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies [g finished it. i got bored. i've not completed it several times now, not unlike my experience with kubrick's 2001.]
War and Peace
Vanity Fair [never interested in the book. and tom hanks was in the movie, so that killed it for me.]
The Time Traveller’s Wife [another one i've never heard of.]
+ The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations [see, with a title like that, you're bound to be disappointed. so i decided not to read it. ever.]
*+ American Gods [dude. nerful. how could i not?]
A heartbreaking work of staggering genius
Atlas shrugged [i have a constitutional aversion to ayn rand.]
Reading Lolita in Tehran [but i have read - all but the last ten pages or so - the bookseller of kabul. good stuff.]
Memoirs of a Geisha [wasn't impressed. there's a much better book written by an actual geisha that i'd recommend, if i could remember the title. it's upstairs, and i'm too lazy to go looking for it. oh, wait. amazon to the rescue. geisha, a life; by mineko iwasaki.]
Middlesex [this is a book? you're sure?]
Quicksilver [but i saw the kevin bacon movie! with jami gertz! (who, incidentally, was pointless in the lost boys. why have a girl in an essentially queer vampire coven?) what? not the same thing? oh....]
+ * Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales [thank you, mr. segedy. and for making me memorize the first four lines, taking up precious brain cells that no doubt could have been used to pass the virginia bar exam. i just tried to find mr. segedy online, but the closest i could get in the minute i devoted to the task was a potential landlord in miraflores.]
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Love in the Time of Cholera [read it in spanish if you can. fabulous language.]
* Brave new world [another high school requirement. loved it. especially when the kid hangs himself at the end. oops! did i spoil it?]
The Fountainhead [did i mention my aversion to rand? oh, i see i did. just so you know, it isn't purely political - i read anthem in high school. i'm a scifi geek. i didn't like it. but equilibrium is a great movie. yes, yes, i know. true, true and unrelated.]
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch [nope. nor beginningmarch, nor endmarch. neither longmarch nor shortmarch, either.]
Frankenstein [now, go rent gothic. it's great. especially the flopping fish.]
+ The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula [my father gave this book as a valentine's day gift to my mother. no joke.]
A Clockwork Orange [saw the movie, though. of course - malcolm mcdowell!]
*+ Anansi Boys [see the comment on nerful above.]
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
* 1984 [do it to julia! do it to julia!]
Angels & Demons
The Inferno [never read it, but my brother once scripted an html version of the inferno in highschool... this would've been 1992, or thereabouts, i think. such a visionary!]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One flew over the cuckoo’s nest [yes, yes, but i did see the movie.]
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles [one mr. segedy made us watch, but not read. we did have to read the return of the native, which i loathed and compared in an essay to the writing quality of late-1980s general hospital. turned out segedy was a major thomas hardy fan and he gave me a D on the paper, which i still have.]
Oliver Twist [another one i've seen, but not read. please, sir, may i have some more?]
Gulliver’s Travels
Les misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The curious incident of the dog in the night-time
+* Dune [love dune. love the series. HATE what brian herbert is doing to his father's literary legacy.]
+* The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A people’s history of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon [this was nearly an italics, did not finish. it got so dull and boring, and stephenson was so impressed with his glibness... yuck.]
*+ Neverwhere [and i've seen the bbc miniseries. nerful galore!]
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter [this strikes me as a high school reading requirement, although i may have read it of my own accord. if that is the case, i have no idea why i would have done so, other than out of a vague feeling of "i should read this, it's a classic." didn't think that much of it. thought even less of the movie version, even though it had gary oldman in it.]
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves [and flying planes can be dangerous!]
The Mists of Avalon [ah, marion zimmer bradley. or something like that. couldn't get through the book, but i watched the juliana margolies miniseries. i'm noticing a trend.]
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita [nabakov. i read it either because a) it was required in high school; or b) since the police sang about it, it had to be good. truth.)
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road [didn't think much of it. still don't.]
The Hunchback of Notre Dame [i apparently saw the movie when i was about 3. and came home talking about "the punchback!"]
+ Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance [another one courtesy of segedy. wasn't impressed. maybe 'cuz i'm a girl.]
The Aeneid
Watership Down [9th grade required reading. dripslobber is really all i remember.]
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit [not a tolkien fan, but my mistake was starting with the silmarillion.]
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
October 11th, 2007 at 12:27 pm
[...] So with a few minutes to kill, I did the book meme that Jenny (and some other blogger I read) did. Here ya go: Instructions: Bold what you have read, italicize your did not finishes, strikethrough the ones you hated, put *asterisks next to those you’ve read more than once, and put a + cross in front of the books that are on your bookshelf. [...]
October 11th, 2007 at 8:32 pm
I’m glad you played along. I enjoyed your commentary, too.
I read a bunch of these in high school, too, but apparently had a different reading list. I got a lot of Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy. (And liked them both. Does this mean I should like General Hospital?)
I read Watership Down as an adult. (Actually, most of the ones I read from this list were as an adult. I actually re-read the high school ones.) But as for the bunny book, while I don’t remember dripslobber, I did retain some Lapine vocab: hrair (a number bigger than 4) and tharn (the deer-in-the-headlights type of temporary paralysis.)
laloca sez: queen dripslobber was the queen of the dogs, i think. and i’m fairly sure stephen king has used “tharn” in some of his books – he often borrows from other sources. lisey’s story is a great example of that (and not a bad read); he spends several pages at the end of the book remarking on some of the not-him source materials.
October 11th, 2007 at 10:31 pm
Ah, dripslobber was a dog. That makes sense.
You know what else I was going to say? Well, you probably don’t. But what I had meant to say was that I was happy to see you also made the undead/unread connection. (My “unread, unread” title is actually due to me having Bela Lugosi’s Dead running through my head.)
October 15th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
I may try doing this myself — when I finish this medium-sized stack of grading.
By the way, the Miraflores rental is, indeed, most likely Señor Segedy, who recently returned to Lima and, from what I understand, just opened up a New York style pizza place near (but not on) Pizza Street.