Lazy Me(me)

I have three books to write about, and I will, but I have been having trouble motivating myself to write.  I have some things to say about The Mosquito Coast, Heart-Shaped Box, and The Big Sleep, and some of those things might even be mildly interesting.  But alas, I lack motivation.  So, to fill in the time until motivation knocks, I present you with a meme I’ve been saving for a lazy day.

By this point, you know the drill, since the meme has been making the rounds for months by now.  This is a list of books that people buy but don’t actually read.  You are to bold the ones you’ve read and italicize the ones you haven’t finished, and leave the unread ones alone.  Here is my list:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina.  I have an irrational fear of the Russians.
Crime and Punishment.  See above.
Catch-22. Loved it and read it ten or more times/
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights.
The Silmarillion. I could never get more than ten pages into this one.
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose. Have I said that I love Umberto Eco?
Don Quixote. Hilarious, awesome, sad, perfect.
Moby Dick.  Genius.
Ulysses. I wrote my senior thesis on this one.
Madame Bovary.  Highly recommended.
The Odyssey.  I’ve read it nine or ten times and taught it five or six.
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway.  In answer to Albee’s question:  I am.
Great Expectations.  I’ve read almost all of Dickens.
American Gods. Gaiman is very cool.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.  Weird, obnoxious, but ultimately quite good.
Atlas Shrugged.  I can’t even vear the thought of trying to read Rand.
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex.  Taught it–great book.
Quicksilver. Stephenson is amazing–the entire Baroque cycle is stunning.
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales.
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum. Eco!
Middlemarch
Frankenstein.  The best monster novel ever.
The Count of Monte Cristo. My favorite.
Dracula.  The second best monster novel ever.
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King.  I became obsessed with this when I was 11.
The Grapes of Wrath.  Steinbeck’s best.
The Poisonwood Bible.  A little preachy, but heartfelt and awesomely written.
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno.  Taught it.
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune. Heresy alert: this bored me to tears.
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

Beloved.  I’ve read it and like it a lot and I’ll be teaching it this fall, but I have to say, the evangelical piety of Morrison fans is enough to make me sick to my stomach.
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter.  I am a Hawthorne geek–I’ve read it 20 times.
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame.  It’s on my list.
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Read: 66

Never Finished: 3

Not Read: 37