As if my English nerdery was not already mightily apparent, here is a list of novels/books of poetry/short stories I remember reading throughout my life, part of a master list I’ve been wanting to create for years, for memory’s and posterity’s sakes, in addition to some books I’ve started, and some I’ve absolutely refused to finish. Listed alphabetically by author, of course, because we all know I couldn’t handle it any other, less anal-retentive, way.
(And lest you think I boast endless amounts of free time, let me remind you I was an English Lit. major in college. OK, then. Here we go!)
Finished:
A-G
Things Fall Apart; The Madman, Chinua Achebe
Democracy, Henry Adams
Rashomon, Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Sense & Sensibility, Jane Austen
The Land Of Little Rain, Mary Austin
Culture and Anarchy, Matthew Arnold
My First Goose, Isaac Babel
Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth
The Devil’s Dictionary; An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Ambrose Bierce
Cathedral; What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
My Antonia, Willa Cather
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, Joyce Carol Oates
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Not On Our Watch, Don Cheadle & Jon Prendergast
The Lady with the Dog; Misery, Anton Chekhov
The Awakening; Desiree’s Baby, Kate Chopin
Loose Woman, Sandra Cisneros
Blessing The Boats, Lucille Clifton
The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Maggie: A Girl Of The Streets, Stephen Crane
Tales of Conjure and The Color Line, Charles Waddell Chesnutt
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities & Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Sister Carrie, Theodore Dreiser
You Shall Know Our Velocity, Dave Eggers
Middlemarch, George Eliot
The Waste Land, Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
Self-Reliance Other Essays, Ralph Waldo Emerson
Saint Marie (1934): Marie Lazarre, Louise Erdrich
The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Woman And The Men, Nikki Giovanni
The Sound and The Fury; As I Lay Dying; Absalom, Absalom; That Evening Sun, William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Revolt of “Mother”, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
H-P
Dead Until Dark; Living Dead In Dallas; Club Dead; Dead To The World; Dead As A Doornail; Definitely Dead; All Together Dead; From Dead To Worse, Charlaine Harris
The Scarlet Letter; The Minister’s Black Veil; Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Catch-22, Joseph Heller
Farewell to Arms; The Old Man and The Sea; The Sun Also Rises; Hills Like White Elephants, Ernest Hemingway
Communion, Bell Hooks
The Rise Of Silas Lapham, William Dean Howells
Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes
Their Eyes Were Watching God; Sweat, Zora Neale Hurston
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
A White Heron, Sarah Orne Jewett
The Metamorphosis; The Hunger Artist, Franz Kafka
Flowers for Algernon, Daniel Keyes
One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Ken Kesey
The Merry Recluse, Caroline Knapp
Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer
The Rocking-Horse Winner, D.H. Lawrence
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee
Main Street, Sinclair Lewis
The Call Of The Wild, Jack London
The Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud
Old Mother Savage, Guy de Maupassant
Moby-Dick; Redburn; Typee,; Billy Budd; The Confidence-Man; Bartleby the Scrivener, Herman Melville
Twilight; New Moon; Eclipse; Breaking Dawn; Midnight Sun (partial draft), Stephenie Meyer
On Liberty and other Essays, John Stuart Mill
The Crucible, Arthur Miller
Lust, Susan Minot
Like Life, Lorrie Moore
Beloved, Toni Morrison
The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien
A Good Man is Hard to Find; Good Country People, Flannery O’Connor
1984; Animal Farm, George Orwell
Truth & Beauty, Ann Patchett
The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
The Fall of the House of Usher; The Tell-Tale Heart; The Raven; The Bells, The Cask of Amontillado; The Purloined Letter, Edgar Allan Poe
The Jilting of Granny Weatherall, Katherine Anne Porter
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
Q-Z
Harry Potter: Books 1-7, J.K. Rowling
The Catcher In The Rye, J.D. Salinger
Offloading for Mrs. Schwartz, George Saunders
A Midsummer Night’s Dream; The Tempest; Romeo&Juliet; King Lear; Hamlet; Love’s Labor Lost; Macbeth; Henry IV; All’s Well That Ends Well, Shakespeare
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
Walden and Civil Disobedience, Henry David Thoreau
Lord Of The Rings: Books 1 & 2, J.R.R. Tolkien
Eats, Shoots & Leaves, Lynne Truss
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; Pudd’nhead Wilson, Mark Twain
Slaughterhouse Five, Kurt Vonnegut
The Color Purple; Everyday Use, Alice Walker
The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
Night, Elie Wiesel
The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde
Currently Reading:
On Writing, Stephen King (I may have stolen borrowed this off of Chris’ nightstand this morning because he read me three excerpts from it Saturday while we were driving to the beach, and while I’m not a huge fan of King’s typical genre, three excerpts and forty pages in and I’m already hooked on this book.)
Started:
Made In America; A Short History Of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson
Scribbling The Cat; Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight, Alexandra Fuller (Why am I simultaneously attempting to read two different books by the same author? Twice. Great question. I have no logical answer.)
The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan
Discarded, For Now:
Caramelo, Sandra Cisneros (I absolutely adore Cisneros and Loose Woman is one of the best books of poetry ever written, but for some reason I couldn’t get into this novel.)
A Thread Across The Ocean, John Steele Gordon (It’s the history of the transatlantic cable, and I have every intention of finishing it. Someday.)
Jumpers, Tom Stoppard (This was a gift from a dear friend, and I will finish it before I die. I hope.)
Discarded, Forever:
Snapshots, William Norris (Did I ever tell you the story about how the author emailed me two years! after I wrote that post, after apparently googling himself and seeing I wasn’t a big fan? Awesome.)
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (Ugh. I tried, I really did. But the movie is just way better, and Alcott’s writing style irks me.)
Death Comes For The Archbishop, Willa Cather (I realized about twenty pages into this book that it was hard enough for me to read My Ántonia when I was forced to for class, so reading Cather for recreation wasn’t so much going to happen.)
I posted a picture of him for a silly Instagram-related game and found him waiting for me in my dreams, something which occurs so rarely it still explodes solidly-constructed dams inside me each time I see his face, mustached and smiling at mine just the way he always did, just the way I always remember him. As usual he didn’t say much, not anything I could hear or remember, but he was there and I knew it, and when I → Read more...
I have words washed out to sea. Words ushered quietly from my lips to my fingertips, waiting patiently for the right tide, for the moon to bring my stories alive.
I have words being reviewed, words accepted and words rejected, and I’m clinging to my favorite lines, fighting for them, and it feels strange and new and exhilaratingly infuriating, this tug-of-war of wills and how the slightest bit of caving can make me feel like I’m flirting with abandoning the sanctity → Read more...
[Alternately titled: Story, The Second: The Girl Who Moved To Washington State]
It began simply. A direct message on Twitter first, followed by texts; those texts, in turn, begat plans. With those plans came anxiety and apprehension – I didn’t know you, not your face or your voice or anything else, and I wasn’t sure I was ready to – but also something exciting, a strange and unexpected hope hovering quietly on the horizon. And then we met, conversed and laughed → Read more...
Stories I said I had. Tangential stories and life-changing ones.
Until today I haven’t known where, exactly, to begin. And so quiet this space has mostly been because some beginnings are tricky. Sometimes it’s quite impossible to denote where something ended and something else entirely began.
I’m not going to be able to tell you everything, but then the best stories never really do, do they?
(That’s not a trick question. I promise they don’t.)
(Unless the story was penned by Henry James, in → Read more...