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Reading:
Richard II
Moving:
'" Nordic Track: . miles
Watching: something or other about Rimbaud,
but not closely (obviously)
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December 18: Books
I have taken a page from Jessie's
and Mo's books about what I ought to
see and read. Of feminista.com's
list of most important
(fiction, nongenre, except Shirley Jackson who apparently as a "classic"
is exempt from pigeonholing into a genre--unlike Ursula LeGuin) English-language
books by women in the th century:
- Dorothy Allison, Bastard Out of Carolina
Excellent.
- Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird
Sings
Painful, but worth reading
- Margaret Atwood, Cat's Eye
Everyone's favorite Atwood but mine (Robber Bride or Handmaid's
Tale) . However, my first Atwood (May ), and one given me by my
sister, and therefore valuable even before Atwood signed my copy.
- Beryl Bainbridge, The Bottle Factory Outing
- Toni Cade Bambara, Gorilla, My Love
- Djuna Barnes, Nightwood
- Pat Barker, Regeneration
The whole WWI trilogy is fantastic
- Anita Brookner, Hotel du Lac
- Rita Mae Brown, Rubyfruit Jungle
- Pearl S. Buck, The Good Earth
After one read, this hit my favorites list, displacing something or
other.
- A.S. Byatt, Possession
One of my very very favorite books in the whole wide world. If you read
it, you must read all the poems and all the letters, else you miss the
point as well as ignore Byatt's achievement.
- Angela Carter, Nights at the Circus
- Ana Castillo, So Far From God
- Willa Cather, My Antonia
I love Willa Cather. I have to read The Professor's House.
- Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Bored one evening sophomore year, I asked people in my hall if they
had anything to lend me. I hated my dorm and liked few people in it,
but I remember excepting one fellow from this general rule even before
he lent me this.
- Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street
- Ivy Compton-Burnett, Elders and Betters
- Anita Desai, Clear Light of Day
- Isak Dinesen, Out of Africa
The movie is great in the way that movies can be if you haven't read
the book first, like "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." The book has
a lot more hunting, and of killing a lion for no discernable purpose
but "sport," says, "Was this shot not a declaration of love?" It's hard
to get over that.
- Harriet Doerr, Stones for Ibarra
- Margaret Drabble, The Radiant Way
I've tried to read Drabble since I found out she's Byatt's half-sister.
I'll keep trying.
- Daphne DuMaurier, Rebecca
Great gothic fun.
- Buchi Emecheta, Second Class Citizen
- Louise Erdrich, Tracks
- Penelope Fitzgerald, At Freddie's
I've read The Blue Flower and The Bookshop but I believe
it was At Freddie's that won the Booker.
- Fannie Flagg, Fried Green Tomatoes at the
Whistle Stop Cafe
I might not have read this as closely as a gay woman might after hearing
how Hollywood diluted the women's relationship, but I really didn't
think there was much in the book for the movie to have bowdlerized.
Their relationship didn't have to be explicit, anymore than a het couple's
relationship has to be spelled out.
- Janet Frame, Owls Do Cry
- Marilyn French, The Women's Room
- Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem
- Nadine Gordimer, July's People
- Mary Gordon, The Rest of Life
- Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness
- Bessie Head, When Rain Clouds Gather
- Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley
Is this actually good or was there just a movie about it?
- Janet Hobhouse, The Furies
- Keri Hulme, The Bone People
Next up for my book group
- Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes were Watching
God
One of my absolute favorites.
- Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House
If this is here--i.e., if the list succumbs to (gasp!) genre, where
is The Left Hand of Darkness, arguably more important in its
field than this? Aha, feminista.com says that mystery and science fiction
get their own lists. And so horror and suspense belongs here why?
- Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust
- Erica Jong, Fear of Flying
- Jamaica Kincaid, Lucy
- Barbara Kingsolver, The Bean Trees
- Maxine Hong Kingston, Tripmaster Monkey
I've read China Men
- Joy Kogawa, Obasan
- Margaret Laurence, The Fire-Dwellers
- Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
One of my two favorite books in the whole wide world, full stop.
- Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
- Penelope Lively, Moon Tiger
I've read The Ghost of Thomas Kempe. Does that count?
- Anita Loos, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
- Olivia Manning, The Balkan Trilogy
- Marmon Silko, Almanac of the Dead Leslie
- Mary McCarthy, The Group
- Carson McCullers, Ballad of the Sad Cafe
- Terry McMillan, Mama
Waiting to Exhale and Disappearing Acts were both great.
I started Mama, which is entirely different. I guess I expected
more lite, relationship fare.
- Isabel Miller, Patience and Sarah
- Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind
For notoriety, maybe. But the best? Ahahaha.
- Lorrie Moore, Anagrams
- Toni Morrison, Beloved
Wonderful. Either this or Song of Solomon would have been good
choices, or both.
- Bharati Mukherjee, Wife
- Alice Munro, Lives of Girls and Women
- Iris Murdoch, A Severed Head
I need to read Iris Murdoch because A.S. Byatt loves her.
- Joyce Carol Oates, You Must Remember This
- Edna O'Brien, House of Splendid Isolation
- Flannery O'Connor, A Good Man is Hard to Find
- Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
Haunting and painful and read and I never have to read it again. Evil
in Literature, fall 1990 at UConn.
- Grace Paley, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute
- Dorothy Parker, Stories
Tee hee.
- Jayne Anne Phillips, Black Tickets
- Marge Piercy, Braided Lives
A good book. I'm glad it's this and not Vida, though, because
I think I'm done with Piercy.
- Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
Tenth-grade English and since then.
- Katharine Anne Porter, Ship of Fools
- Dawn Powell, The Golden Spur
- E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News
AMB loved it and SEBB
hated it. Thus, I am torn.
- Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Yep.
- Mary Renault, The King Must Die
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
This is not a love story, folks, despite what the movie (which I refuse
to besmirch myself with the sight of) would tell you.
- Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
- Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things
Thanks, Nisou! This
is good.
- May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing
- Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries
I don't know why this won a Pulitzer. It just didn't speak to me.
- Anita Shreve, The Weight of Water
- Mona Simpson, Anywhere But Here
- Elizabeth Smart, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept
I've never even heard of this.
- Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
I'll read any Smiley any time.
- Susan Sontag, The Volcano Lover
- Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Revenge in Literature, UConn, fall 1993.
- Christina Stead, The Man Who Loved Children
- Gertrude Stein, Three Lives
- Elizabeth Taylor, Angel
- Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club
Super voice.
- Anne Tyler, If Morning Ever Comes
No. No no no. I've read Breathing Lessons; I've read Searching
for Caleb. I'm excused.
- Jane Urquhart, Away
- Alice Walker, The Color Purple
Wonderful, though I prefer Temple of My Familiar.
- Fay Weldon, The Life and Loves of a She-Devil
Revenge in Literature, UConn, fall 1993.
- Eudora Welty, Stories
- Rebecca West, The Return of the Soldier
- Edith Wharton, Ethan Frome
Lyme-Old Lyme High School, eleventh grade
- Antonia White, Frost in May
- Jeannette Winterson, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
I've liked The Passion and Sexing the Cherry.
- Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
Modern English Lit, UConn fall 1988
Thirty down; 70 to go.
That list was in response to this
one from the Modern Library Association, which was ordered. Did I
already mention this?
- James Joyce, Ulysses
I know I should but it's unlikely
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
- James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
If I don't read Ulysses I really should read at least this
- Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
This is on my list
- Aldous Huxley, Brave New World
Tenth-grade English, I think.
- William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Summer 1993
- Joseph Heller, Catch-22
Spring 1995
- Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon
- D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers
- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath
Eleventh grade
- Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
- Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh
I've read Erewhon
- George Orwell, 1984
Tenth grade
- Robert Graves, I, Claudius
Fall 1996
- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse
- Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
No more Theodore Dreiser
- Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five
freshling year
- Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
- Richard Wright, Native Son
Tenth grade
- Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King
- John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra
- John Dos Passos, U.S.A. (trilogy)
- Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
Fall 1995
- E.M. Forster, A Passage to India
- Henry James, The Wings of the Dove
- Henry James, The Ambassadors
No Henry James either
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender Is the Night
- James T. Farrell, The Studs Lonigan Trilogy
- Ford Maddox Ford, The Good Soldier
- George Orwell, Animal Farm
Tenth grade
- Henry James, The Golden Bowl
- Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie
U.S. History, 1877-Present, summer 1993 at UConn
- Evelyn Waugh, A Handful of Dust
- William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
Summer 1994
- Robert Penn Warren, All the King's Men
- Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey
- E.M. Forster, Howards End
1991
- James Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain
- Graham Greene, The Heart of the Matter
- William Golding, Lord of the Flies
Tenth grade
- James Dickey, Deliverance
- Anthony Powell, A Dance to the Music of Time (series)
- Aldous Huxley, Point Counter Point
- Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
Fall 1992
- Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent
I maybe read this in eleventh grade, but I'm probably thinking of
The Secret Sharer
- Joseph Conrad, Nostromo
- D.H. Lawrence, The Rainbow
- D.H. Lawrence, Women in Love
- Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer
- Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead
- Philip Roth, Portnoy's Complaint
- Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
- William Faulkner, Light in August
- Jack Kerouac, On the Road
- Dashiell Hammett, The Maltese Falcon
English 109, spring 1988 at UConn
- Ford Maddox Ford, Parade's End
- Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence
- Max Beerbohm, Zuleika Dobson
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer
- Willa Cather, Death Comes for the Archbishop
1996 or '97
- James Jones, From Here to Eternity
- John Cheever, The Wapshot Chronicles
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
1984
- Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange
1984
- W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage
1986
- Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness
English 105, fall 1985 at LOLHS
- Sinclair Lewis, Main Street
- Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth
- Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet
- Richard Hughes, A High Wind in Jamaica
- V.S. Naipaul, A House for Mr. Biswas
- Nathanael West, The Day of the Locust
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
1993
- Evelyn Waugh, Scoop
- Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Revenge in Literature, UConn, fall 1993.
- James Joyce, Finnegans Wake
- Rudyard Kipling, Kim
- E.M. Forster, A Room With a View
1991
- Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
1990
- Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March
- Wallace Stegner, Angle of Repose
- V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
- Elizabeth Bowen, The Death of the Heart
I've read The Last September (Modern Irish Lit, fall 1989
at UConn)
- Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim
- E.L. Doctorow, Ragtime
- Arnold Bennett, The Old Wives' Tale
- Jack London, The Call of the Wild
- Henry Green, Loving
- Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children
- Erskine Caldwell, Tobacco Road
- William Kennedy, Ironweed
- John Fowles, The Magus
After The French Lieutenant's Woman and A Maggot,
I'll read any Fowles
- Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea
1992
- Iris Murdoch, Under the Net
- William Styron, Sophie's Choice
- Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
- James M. Cain, The Postman Always Rings Twice
- J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
- Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons
Twenty-seven down, 73 to go. Or fewer.
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Happy 23rd birthday, Shadow.
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