A Different Look at the Book Meme
Aug. 17th, 2006 10:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
viciouswishesInstead of doing the book meme, I was more interested to find when and where and how I'd read the so-called 1,001 must read books. I broke them down into On My Own and then each class.
On My Own in Junior High/High School
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
On My Own in College/Post-College
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Most of these are more modern books. Modern being last 50 years or so written. Some of them, I picked up on a whim at the bookstore; and others, were ones that I "needed to read." I tend to find an author that I like and then read a lot by them like Ondaatje, Atwood, Rice, Adams, and Winterson. I read Tolkien after seeing the first two LOTR movies. Some of them where books that I was told I "shouldn't read."
High School
9th grade English
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Pretty much classics and not very long reads. However, I hated Les Miserables.
10th grade English
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Uh...
11th Grade English
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Scarlet Letter still gives Lornelover flashbacks of when we had to write that horrid essay.
12th grade English
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
This was a book a picked up on a whim to do a book report on a book "not written in the United States."
College
Women's Lit
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
All very much classics and all books that I loved. This was one of the classes that cemented my trip as an English major.
Gay & Lesbian Lit
Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
Hall's is a classic, but not something I really super enjoyed reading. Depressing, lesbians. Baldwin's, however, was fabu, and he's becoming another one of those "now I must read everything he wrote" authors.
British Lit III
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
Why does this not surprise me? This class was from a professor that I didn't enjoy for many reasons and one was definitely that you had to argue what canon (as in the English Lit field) was saying. Her choice in literature was really predictable. (This is not to say that I didn't love some of it.)
International Relations
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
I absolutely did not enjoy reading this. I kind of felt the same way about the class.
Irish Lit
Ulysses – James Joyce
This is really my "I don't have to read all those other books because I read this" book. You can find many lj entries on it if you want further information.
Intro to English Studies
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
I read this one at the same time that I was reading Joyce's Ulysses. I wanted to stab my eyes out from the experimental fiction. (I was also reading No-No Boy by John Okada too, all for classes.) Though there were parts that I enjoyed. You can also read lj entries on this.
Being someone with a BA in English, I find it really interesting that I've only read 49 of these books. At first, I wondered if it had to do with changes in the canon and what colleges were teaching. However, there were a lot recent modern ones on it with lots of women authors as well.
Conclusion: DAMN, YOU FANFIC WRITERS AND DISTRACTING ME!
On My Own in Junior High/High School
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje
Moon Palace – Paul Auster
The Handmaid's Tale – Margaret Atwood
Perfume – Patrick Süskind
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller
On My Own in College/Post-College
The Hours – Michael Cunningham
Written on the Body – Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
Delta of Venus – Anaïs Nin
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Most of these are more modern books. Modern being last 50 years or so written. Some of them, I picked up on a whim at the bookstore; and others, were ones that I "needed to read." I tend to find an author that I like and then read a lot by them like Ondaatje, Atwood, Rice, Adams, and Winterson. I read Tolkien after seeing the first two LOTR movies. Some of them where books that I was told I "shouldn't read."
High School
9th grade English
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Les Misérables – Victor Hugo
Pretty much classics and not very long reads. However, I hated Les Miserables.
10th grade English
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
Uh...
11th Grade English
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Fall of the House of Usher – Edgar Allan Poe
The Scarlet Letter still gives Lornelover flashbacks of when we had to write that horrid essay.
12th grade English
Jack Maggs – Peter Carey
This was a book a picked up on a whim to do a book report on a book "not written in the United States."
College
Women's Lit
Beloved – Toni Morrison
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
All very much classics and all books that I loved. This was one of the classes that cemented my trip as an English major.
Gay & Lesbian Lit
Giovanni's Room – James Baldwin
The Well of Loneliness – Radclyffe Hall
Hall's is a classic, but not something I really super enjoyed reading. Depressing, lesbians. Baldwin's, however, was fabu, and he's becoming another one of those "now I must read everything he wrote" authors.
British Lit III
White Teeth – Zadie Smith
Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
Dracula – Bram Stoker
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Garden Party – Katherine Mansfield
Why does this not surprise me? This class was from a professor that I didn't enjoy for many reasons and one was definitely that you had to argue what canon (as in the English Lit field) was saying. Her choice in literature was really predictable. (This is not to say that I didn't love some of it.)
International Relations
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
I absolutely did not enjoy reading this. I kind of felt the same way about the class.
Irish Lit
Ulysses – James Joyce
This is really my "I don't have to read all those other books because I read this" book. You can find many lj entries on it if you want further information.
Intro to English Studies
Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
I read this one at the same time that I was reading Joyce's Ulysses. I wanted to stab my eyes out from the experimental fiction. (I was also reading No-No Boy by John Okada too, all for classes.) Though there were parts that I enjoyed. You can also read lj entries on this.
Being someone with a BA in English, I find it really interesting that I've only read 49 of these books. At first, I wondered if it had to do with changes in the canon and what colleges were teaching. However, there were a lot recent modern ones on it with lots of women authors as well.
Conclusion: DAMN, YOU FANFIC WRITERS AND DISTRACTING ME!
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no subject
on 2006-08-18 05:33 am (UTC)cool!
no subject
on 2006-08-19 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-18 05:35 am (UTC)Gabrielle
no subject
on 2006-08-18 01:03 pm (UTC)And I read Last of the Mohicans about three years ago on my own, because I liked the movie and figured I should read the book to know the differences between the two. Now I know. The movie has action. The book is dreadfully boring and unrealistic. No more James Fenimore Cooper novels for me. Ever. I slogged my way through it out of a sheer sense that I had to finish this, because I hate people who see the movie and don't read the book, and I wasn't going to be one of them.
no subject
on 2006-08-18 04:15 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
no subject
on 2006-08-19 06:11 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-19 03:27 pm (UTC)Gabrielle
no subject
on 2006-08-18 06:20 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-19 06:34 am (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-18 12:48 pm (UTC):D I concur. I think I've read...three non-fanfiction books this summer. My count is shamefully low for a person who used to go through a book a week.
no subject
on 2006-08-18 02:13 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-19 09:00 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-08-19 07:09 pm (UTC)