A Literary List

An arbitrary (and it really is) of great works of fiction floating around. The bolded are the ones I’ve read. Finally something at which I have outperformed Chun the Unavoidable.

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
Shaw, George Bernard - 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

Some on the list are books I will never read. I can’t stand Henry James. I’ve tried four times, and can’t bear more than 50 pages. I am probably alone in this, but I prefer Autumn of the Patriarch to 100 Years of Solitude. I admit I cannot tell what the basis for selection was, not that it matters. The selections are certaily odd - Joyce's Portrait of the Artist but not Ulysses? One last comment - I was surprized by how many of these books I'd read and the portion I read in high school. Well, the product of public schools.

Comments

[Stanley Featherstonehaugh]

regarding the poem, eh, so what, feel nothing, see ants instead of words on screen - very dispassionate, despite signing about bodies and whatnot - so do something already, you gonna write a poem like that, spice it up. I can be an intellectual with most of them, but this bores, and seems to exist only because of some ill-deserved reputation the poet garnered or something of that sort.

By the way, don't waste a moment of your time reading about String Theory in Physics, for it stands shamefully debunked; what can you expect, when equations do not balance, from people who simply add another dimension of nondescribed nature, and assign it the value of the difference in the equation. I screamed that for years, others too timid to point out the emperor's new penis, and it came true. I believe they are redfaced, and certainly should be - string theory, a scientific splinter with no rigor, no replication, but a lot of non-empirical dimensions, the nature of which never having been described, or, I believe firmly, known or even seriously hypothesized.

The only reason to read anything about the law is to seek weak spots and exploit them, and, with enough people, cause it to topple under its topheavy weight. Did you notice that most politicians ae attorneys of some sort - many, I'm sure, with an esteemed degree from Grenada or Liberia. If you've noticed this overrepresentation by one profession, which indicates these polis are not so good at barristing, that they are the very fuckwipes who make all these puritanically driven laws. Puritanism is precisely the Calvinistic resistance to the Church Of England and to the Catholic Church; they made up all these rules -- taking drugs, speeding, etc. etc. -- and then claim a biblical antecedent, while there is none. The worst figure in history, bar none unless there was a Khmer Rouge during pre-history, is Paul, referred to by some clowns as a saint, but to me, a trained, professional psychotherapist, retired, a vanilla sociopath. Much of what became dogma was the scribblings of Paul the pen pill, and he was on the rather quick draw side of judging others, yet, oddly, not himself. Should there be time travel, I think I would kill him; Since he and the Catholic Church with which he is closely identified laid the templates for blitzkriegs, attachs in overwhelming numbers and killing movements of any sort. Had there been a way to kill off that institution and Paul, never would a hitler have come into anything but a pathetic little headshot in his threadbare wallet.