Archive for the ‘lists’ Category

h1

Top Ten Short Stories

April 28, 2007

On Monday The Literate Kitten posted a ten favorite short stories list, and challenged others to do the same. Here’s what I’ve come up with.

I must confess that I am not a reader of short stories, generally, and therefore my list has a very Nortonesque flavor to it:

  1. “The Dead,” Joyce
  2. “Investigations of a Dog,” Kafka
  3. “Gimpel the Fool,” Singer
  4. “White Nights,” Dostoevsky
  5. “Revelation,” O’Connor
  6. “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Hawthorne
  7. “Cathedral,” Carver
  8. “Barn Burning,” Faulkner
  9. “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” Fitzgerald
  10. “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Salinger

Many of the items on my list also appear on tLK’s, which either means that we have similar taste, or that we both read the Norton Anthology…

Posted in joyce, lists, meme, short stories | 5 Comments »

h1

Wanna-Read: Top 5

March 7, 2007

Sure, I’ll bite on a meme.

Working with the general tenor of the Newsweek list, I’ll name books that I have been wanting to tackle for some time, but aren’t necessarily on my list of upcoming reads. Also, I limited myself to titles that aren’t presently sitting on my shelf.

  1. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
  2. The Golden Bough, Sir James Frazer
  3. Gravity’s Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon
  4. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
  5. Possession, A. S. Byatt

Posted in lists, meme, self-reference | 3 Comments »

h1

How about a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole?

February 18, 2007

Meme! [via Naked Without Books! and the Superfast Reader]

Look at the list of books below. Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you want to read, cross out the ones you won’t touch with a 10 foot pole, put a cross (+) in front of the ones on your book shelf, and asterisk (*) the ones you’ve never heard of.

(I’m going to add “indifference” as a category by not marking some at all).

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon) *
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry) *
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving) +
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees (Ann-Marie MacDonald) +
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)
28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck) +
30. Tuesdays with Morrie (Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett) *
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay) *
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel) *
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela’s Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She’s Come Undone (Wally Lamb) *
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)
53. Ender’s Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence) *
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough) *
59. The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller’s Wife (Audrey Niffenegger) *
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand) (I’ve read it, and don’t want to get near it ever again)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)
65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davies) *
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares)
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) +
69. Les Miserables (Hugo) +
70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones’ Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez) +
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay) *
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte’s Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley) *
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck)
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier) *
84. Wizard’s First Rule (Terry Goodkind) *
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down (Richard Adams) +
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)
88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields) *
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago) *
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer) +
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje) *
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth (Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford) *
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce)

Posted in lists | 9 Comments »

h1

Chunkster Challenge 2007

February 12, 2007

Even though the entry period is over, I’ve decided to join the Chunkster Challenge. I realize that I’m late to the party, but I had just started blogging at the time it was thrown down, so hopefully my tardiness will be forgiven.

It seems to me that if one is going to go big, one should go big in a big way — so here’s my list:

  1. The Aeneid, Virgil
  2. The Divine Comedy, Dante
  3. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
  4. The Recognitions, William Gaddis
  5. Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace
  6. Underworld, Don DeLillo
  7. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen

It’s a good mix of old and new, and I firmly believe that I’ll enjoy each book. I’m (relatively) nearing the end of Don Quixote, and have begun the Aeneid — so I’m off to a good start. I’ll probably dip into Underworld as I’m reading the Aeneid, and spread Dante over a long stretch of time so I can savor each canto.

Best of luck to everyone else who’s chunking.

Posted in lists, self-reference | 8 Comments »

h1

Fun with Lists: My Top Ten Works of Fiction

February 9, 2007

It’s a list, it’s a meme — it’s hard, but it’s worth it.

For additional difficulty, I forced myself to put them in order. Sacrilege, I know — but it’s all a matter of degree, and it’s good to force yourself into some tough decisions every once in a while.

  1. Ulysses, James Joyce
  2. Middlemarch, George Eliot
  3. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
  5. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  6. The Plague, Albert Camus
  7. Howard’s End, E.M. Forster
  8. A Portrait of the Artist As Young Man, James Joyce
  9. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
  10. Herzog, Saul Bellow

Followed with a brief commentary:

Ulysses. I will insist to the end that there is no book as good as Ulysses. The fact that I fully understand less than half of it only contributes to this fact: it stands ever before me, full of life, joy, laughter, sadness, and two or three moments of tears-on-the-page connectedness.

Middlemarch. Can a novel have a perfect moral compass? I think Middlemarch does. This novel has a decidedly visceral effect on me: over 800 pages the story flows steadily and with a soft momentum — I never want to be glancing ahead or referring back, for what I’m reading at the moment couldn’t be any better. And when the narrative voice breaks in, as it always does at just the right moment… whew.

To the Lighthouse. The “Time Passes” section alone would probably make it onto this list as a work of fiction. Virginia Woolf’s prose is the best prose. The whole strains towards unity, and the passage in which Mr. Ramsay ponders over how to “get to Q” blows the top of my head. The only reason Mrs. Dalloway isn’t on the list is that I’ve only read it once, and never feel like I’m ready to try again.

Lolita. I simply adore Nabokov’s rascally prose, and the sparks that fly as passages and events come together as I read. The longer the sentence, the better. Humbert is one of literature’s great characters.

The Great Gatsby. I haven’t returned to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece in several years, but between the ages of 17 and 21 I must have read it six or seven times. Other works have since surpassed it in my estimation, but I still consider it a truly perfect novel, and I wouldn’t be the reader I am today if I hadn’t embraced it so thoroughly in high-school.

The Plague. Camus is one of my personal idols, and his philosophy fully inhabits this novel. There are no heroes, only good men fighting for life in the face of death.

Howard’s End. Forster has a talent for short, incisive chapters that begin and conclude with perfect paragraphs. His restrained, refined style is sensational. Howard’s End also contains one of my favorite passages ever.

A Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man. Yes, that’s two Joyce on one list. I worship at the shrine. Silence, cunning, and exile — Joyce certainly did well following his own guidelines. The novel is full of brilliant scenes and passages — “peppered with epiphanies.”

The Scarlet Letter. Another novel with a perfect moral compass. America is a Puritan nation, a spiritual, legalistic, and psychological nation — and The Scarlet Letter encompasses all of these things. Plus, it’s structure is unparalleled.

Herzog. Bellow’s erudition and spirit reached it’s high point in this novel. Poor Moses Herzog — all he wants is meaning!

Posted in joyce, lists | Leave a Comment »

h1

Fun with Lists: The Modern Library Top 100

February 8, 2007

I did this for myself a few years back, and seeing Danielle’s list inspired me to post it here.

   1. Ulysses, James Joyce
   2. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
   3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyces Joyce
   4. Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
   5. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
   6. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
   7. Catch-22, Joseph Heller
   8. Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler
   9. Sons and Lovers, D.H. Lawrence
  10. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
  11. Under the Volcano, Malcolm Lowry
  12. The Way of All Flesh, Samuel Butler
  13. 1984, George Orwell
  14. I, Claudius, Robert Graves
  15. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
  16. An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser
  17. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
  18. Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut
  19. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison
  20. Native Son, Richard Wright
  21. Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow
  22. Appointment in Samarra, John O’ Hara
  23. U.S.A. (trilogy), John Dos Passos
  24. Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
  25. A Passage to India, E.M. Forster
  26. The Wings of the Dove, Henry James
  27. The Ambassadors, Henry James
  28. Tender is the Night, F. Scott Fitzgerald
  29. The Studs Lonigan Trilogy, James T. Farrell
  30. The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
  31. Animal Farm, George Orwell
  32. The Golden Bowl, Henry James
  33. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
  34. A Handful of Dust, Evelyn Waugh
  35. As I Lay Dying, William Faulkner
  36. All the King’s Men, Robert Penn Warren
  37. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder
  38. Howards End, E.M. Forster
  39. Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin
  40. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  41. The Lord of the Flies, William Golding
  42. Deliverance, James Dickey
  43. A Dance to the Music of Time (series) Anthony Powell
  44. Point Counter Point, Aldous Huxley
  45. The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
  46. The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
  47. Nostromo, Joseph Conrad
  48. The Rainbow, D.H. Lawrence
  49. Women in Love, D.H. Lawrence
  50. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
  51. The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer
  52. Portnoy’s Complaint, Phillip Roth
  53. Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov
  54. Light in August, William Faulkner
  55. On the Road, Jack Kerouac
  56. The Maltese Falcon, Dashiell Hammet
  57. Parade’s End, Ford Maddox Ford
  58. The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton
  59. Zuleika Dobson, Max Beerbohm
  60. The Moviegoer, Walker Percy
  61. Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather
  62. From Here to Eternity, James Jones
  63. The Wapshot Chronicles, John Cheever
  64. The Cather in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
  65. A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess
  66. Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
  67. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
  68. Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
  69. The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
  70. The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durell
  71. A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
  72. A House for Mr. Biswas, V.S. Naipaul
  73. The Day of the Locust, Nathanael West
  74. A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
  75. Scoop, Evelyn Waugh
  76. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
  77. Finnegans Wake, James Joyce
  78. Kim, Rudyard Kipling
  79. A Room With a View, E.M. Forster
  80. Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
  81. The Adventures of Augie March, Saul Bellow
  82. Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner
  83. A Bend in the River, V.S. Naipaul
  84. The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen
  85. Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad
  86. Ragtime, E.L. Doctorow
  87. The Old Wives’ Tale, Arnold Bennett
  88. The Call of the Wild, Jack London
  89. Loving, Henry Green
  90. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
  91. Tobacco Road, Erskine Caldwell
  92. Ironweed, William Kennedy
  93. The Magus, John Fowles
  94. Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
  95. Under the Net, Iris Murdoch
  96. Sophie’s Choice, William Styron
  97. The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles
  98. The Postman Always Rings Twice, James M. Cain
  99. The Ginger Man, J.P. Donleavy
 100. The Magnificent Ambersons, Booth Tarkington

That was fun. 28 out of 100 isn’t bad, especially when I’ve completed the top 5.

Boy, putting Finnegan’s Wake on there was cruel to those who take it upon themselves to read the whole list…

Posted in lists | 4 Comments »

h1

Fun with Lists: To Acquire

January 24, 2007

Where my Moleskine and my Amazon wish list meet:

Books to Acquire with the Hope of Reading Shortly Thereafter
(ranked according to preference)

  1. Pnin, Nabokov
  2. 300, Frank Miller
  3. What is the What, Dave Eggers
  4. Blood Meridan, Cormac McCarthy
  5. The Heart of the Matter, Graham Greene
  6. On Beauty, Zadie Smith
  7. Jimbo in Purgatory, Gary Panter
  8. The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
  9. On the Nature of Things, Lucretius
  10. The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Norman Cohn
  11. Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer
  12. Money, Martin Amis
  13. Possession, A.S. Byatt
  14. The Classical World: An Epic History from Homer to Hadrian, Robin Lane Fox
  15. Attonement, Ian McEwan

And that will do for now. Generally, I use lists like this while browsing the used bookstore, avoiding that moment when I step in and forget what I want — blinded by the glow of beauty. The list doesn’t include my search for a last few Saul Bellow books, or deciding what Henry James novel I’m going to read next, but it’s helpful just the same.

Any suggestions or comments are most welcome.

Posted in lists | 2 Comments »

h1

Fun with Numbered Lists: Saul Bellow

January 14, 2007

Having just finished The Victim, I’ve now read 11 of Saul Bellow’s 15 works of fiction. I read my first, Herzog, in the summer of 2004, so I’m been going at a pretty good clip. Here’s the list:

  1. Dangling Man (1944)
  2. The Victim (1947)
  3. The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
  4. Seize the Day (1956)
  5. Henderson the Rain King (1959)
  6. Herzog(1964)
  7. Mosby’s Memoirs (1968)
  8. Mr. Sammler’s Planet (1970)
  9. Humboldt’s Gift (1975)
  10. The Dean’s December (1982)
  11. Him with His Foot in His Mouth (1984)
  12. More Die of Heartbreak (1987)
  13. Something to Remember Me By: Three Tales (1991)
  14. The Actual (1997)
  15. Ravelstein (2000)

As you can see, the remaining four were written during the later period of Bellow’s career, after he won the Nobel Prize. I don’t expect the later novels to be as good as the earlier, both because that’s the way it usually goes with writers, and because the later shorter works of fiction I have read were disappointing.

Here’s how I rank them in order of preference:

  1. Herzog
  2. The Adventures of Augie March
  3. Henderson the Rain King
  4. Seize the Day
  5. Mr. Sammler’s Planet
  6. The Victim
  7. Dangling Man
  8. The Actual
  9. Humboldt’s Gift
  10. Something to Remember Me By
  11. Mosby’s Memoirs

The plan is to read More Die of Heartbreak next, although I’m not in a terrible rush, and to finish with Ravelstein. Hopefully the elderly Bellow won’t let me down.

Posted in bellow, lists | Leave a Comment »

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started