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The Classics Meme

The books I’ve read are bolded. (Where is… oh, never mind! This is just a trippy little meme.) I picked this up from icontemplate. Note: I’m not distinguishing between books I read and remember, and books I know I read and couldn’t tell you a thing about any more (and I have a bad feeling I’ve read some of the titles I didn’t bold–they piled it on at college). However, I have starred books I truly enjoyed.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
* Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
* Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
* Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
* Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
* Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
* Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
* Dante - Inferno
* de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
* Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
* Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
* Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
* Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
* Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
* Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
* Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
* Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll’s House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
* Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
* Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
* London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene - Long Day’s Journey into Night
* Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
* Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann’s Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
* Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
* Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
* Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet

George Bernard Shaw - Pygmalion
* Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
* Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
* Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
* Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
* Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass

Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

Posted on this day, other years:

2 Comments

  1. Any idea of the original source of this list? I have many lists of the Great Books at http://www.interleaves.org/~rteeter/greatbks.html. Though there is a lot of overlap in the lists, there are also many worthwhile books that show up on only one or two lists.

    Monday, June 28, 2004 at 10:32 am | Permalink
  2. beatrice wrote:

    Thanks for the list. Looks like I’ve read more of the classics than I thought. Not that I remember much about many either. I’m sure they rocked my world when I read them :-) I try to switch up and include an annual re-read of the books that have meant the most to me. Which means I should put down Lolita in Tehran and pick up Invisible Man before the summer disappears. Ellison was an interesting, complex fellow. I also have a list of the Pulitzer winners from the beginning. My plan is to read them in order… (Aside. The preview feature is funky. I couldn’t seem to post after reviewing, no button.)

    Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 4:24 am | Permalink

One Trackback/Pingback

  1. eclectic librarian on Thursday, June 24, 2004 at 7:40 pm

    classics meme

    I don’t normally do these things, but I was currious to see just how many of the “classics” I have read.

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