Great Books I have read

This topic is for charting our progress through the lists of great books.

I have read many classics of American and British literature - Jane Austen, for example.

I just finished War and Peace, which I loved. It is the prototypical sweeping saga of family and history!

Erica

my favorties:

To Kill a Mockingbird
Jane Eyre
Catcher in the Rye
East of Eden
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Gone with the Wind
Catch-22
Great Gatsby
Angela's Ashes

Hi Blackbub,

Those are some good books - I loved To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jane Eyre. Catch-22 and Catcher in the Rye are two of those incredible kind of books that make you fall over laughing and want to cry alternatively.

Erica

Here are some from "The 100 Most Meaningful Books of All Time" http://library.christchurch.org.nz/Guides/GoodReads/100alltime.asp that I have read:

Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
Pride and Predjudice Jane Austen I've read all of Jane Austen, to be specific)
Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte
Great Expectations Charles Dickens (movie)
Middlemarch George Eliot
The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert (movie)
Dead Souls Nikolai Gogol
The Old Man and the Sea Ernest Hemingway
The Odyssey Homer
The Golden Notebook Doris Lessing
Beloved Toni Morrison
The Tale of Genji Murasaki Shikibu
Hamlet William Shakespeare (movie) & many others
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne (comic)
War and Peace Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain
To the Lighthouse Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway Virginia Woolf

I am counting movies that I've seen, and even a comic book... I also count listening to an audiobook!

Erica

These are from the Harvard Book Store staff's favorite 100 books:
http://www.harvard.com/onourshelves/top100.html

Haruki Murakami they recommend The Wind Up Bird Chronicles I haven't read this but have read several others, and liked them.

Paul Auster they recommend The New York Trilogy I haven't read this but have read, and liked, others...

Lord of the Rings - I read this when it originally came out, when I was a teenager! (Yes, we had printing presses back then...)

Jane Eyre - this is on another list too. Interesting, the books that are on more than one list - would they be "great-squared"?

Nineteen Eighty-Four - required in High School

The Catcher in the Rye

On the Road Jack Kerouak

The Age of Innocence Edith Wharton

Cry the Beloved Country Paton

The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood - really didn't like, don't think I've liked anything by her!

Kitchen Yoshimoto - Good, featuring a modern Japanese woman

Tortilla Curtain Boyle - should be required reading in Southern California where I live.

The Count of Monte Cristo Read in French in High School.

Of Human Bondage Maugham - Good.

Babel 17 Samuel Delaney - Scifi, a rarity on this type of list

Empire Falls Russo - Good

Girl in Landscape Letham

White Noise Delillo I didn't like

Atlas Shrugged Ayn Rand I like some of her ideas but she's not much of a writer - more like a ranter!

Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy Adams - Good: Funny scifi - what could be better?

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter Carson McCullers Everything she wrote is good, but this is fantastic.

Master and Margarita Bulgakov

Whew - that's a lot of "good" books.

Erica

Erica,
I tried to check out the link that you gave for Harvard's list of top 100 books but it didn't work. Do you have any other ideas? I'm very interested in looking at that list. You mentioned Ayn Rand- have you read The Fountainhead and what did you think of it, if you have read it? Which of the books above did you really like? Cry the Beloved Country is one of my favorite books ever. No Longer at Ease is another book about Africa that I really enjoyed.

Bonnie

Hi Blackbub,

Try this link: http://www.harvard.com/index.htm and click on "On Our Shelves".

About Ayn Rand, I read 2 or 3 books by her a long time ago, I'm pretty sure Fountainhead was one of them, but now they're all mushed together in my mind as a kind of Ayn Rand soup, so I can't be sure. I found some of her ideas congenial and others not so. I agree with the insipid mediocrity of most popular culture (may have even gotten worse since she wrote). I like her disdain for many of the conventions of society, and her feeling that everyone should "pull thier weight" so to speak. I know that many people either love or hate her, what do you like or dislike?

As for which above did I really like, too many to name! Jane Austen is one of my favorite; "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter", "The Master Butcher's Singing Club", "Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy", are a few... I'm afraid that as to the real "Classics", I usually enjoy them but and enjoy being exposed to what has been considered important, but don't usually think they're fantastic.

Do you have reviews for "No Longer at Ease"?

Thanks for your feedback!

Among the Great Books I have read - I mean you gotta admit that Pissing in the Snow and Other Ozark Folk Tales was a great book - are the following:

The Epic of Gilgamesh
The Illiad
The Odyssey
The Analects
The Oresteia
The Oedipus Trilogy
The Art of War
The Bhagavad Ghita
The Aeneid
The Pillow Book
Beowulf
The Rubaiyat
The Divine Comedy
The Caterbury Tales
The Prince
Don Quixote
Pilgrim's Progress
Second Treatise of Government
The Narrow Road to the Deep North
Robinson Crusoe
Gulliver's Travels
Candide
Tom Jones
The Life of Samuel Johnson
Works by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Pride and Prejudice
The Red and the Black
The Scarlet Letter
The Voyage of the Beagle and The Origin of Species
Works by Edgar Allen Poe
Great Expectations and Hard Times
The Warden
Jayne Eyre
Wuthering Heights
Walden and Civil Disobedience
Fathers and Sons
Moby Dick and Bartleby the Scrivener and Benito Cerino and Billy Budd
Madame Bovary
Crime and Punishment
War and Peace and Master and Man and The Death of Ivan Ilyich
Works by Emily Dickinson
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass
Huckleberry Finn and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Life on the Mississippi
The Education of Henry Adams
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Nostromo and Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim
The Age of Innocence and The House of Mirth
Kokoro
Works by Robert Frost
Stories by Chekov and Lu Hsun
Zuleika Dobson
Stories by Joyce and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man
Stories by Kafka and The Trial
Mrs. Dalloway, Orlando, and To the Lighthouse
Sons and Lovers
Brave New World
The Sound and the Fury, The Reivers and As I lay Dying
Stories by Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, and To have and Have Not
Beauty and Sadness
Lolita
Animal Farm and Burmese Days and Animal Farm
The Vendor of Sweets
Waiting for Godot
The Plague and The Stranger
The Gulag Archipelago
Confessions of a Mask
Things Fall Apart

Can you tell that I'm partial to The New Lifetime Reading Plan?