Yet Another Book Meme

[vovat]

"Pretentious" Book Meme, stolen from petie_s:

Some of these are what Mark Twain would call classics. Bold the ones you've actually read, italicize the ones you attempted.


Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote - I read all of the first part, and part of the second.
Moby Dick - I did try, but I only made it through the first few pages.
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods - I read most of it when the publisher put the entire thing up online for a promotion, but they took it down before I could finish it.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West - Wait, that's a classic? Well, I guess it IS kind of pretentious, which seems to be the main qualification for inclusion in this. I don't know that that's a fair classification for all of these, but hey, I didn't make the list.
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 - I was supposed to read this for school, but I didn't.
Foucault's Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein - I want to read this.
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
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 Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince - I think I read the whole thing, anyway. It's not really that long, is it? Or did we read an abridged version in college?
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
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
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
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid - I've read summaries of it, so I know the basic story, but I never actually sat down and read it.
Watership Down
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers


You know, these would probably be more interesting if they actually asked for input on the books, instead of just asking whether we've read them. Oh, well. Maybe I'll start another meme of that sort at some point, but I don't feel like it now.

Comments

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

I always just give my input anyway.

Who comes up with these lists, anyway? Half these books aren't classic in the time sense, "pretentious" is a judgement statement-- how do they know somebody didn't recommend a book because they HAD read it and they GENUINELY thought you'd LIKE it? -- and even going by Mark Twain's quote --"books everyone speaks well of but no one ever reads"-- um, maybe a FEW of them? but I think that was a more accurate definition of a classic in Twain's time-- since then, THOSE sorts of classics are the ones everyone has forgotten, and the popular novels of Twain's day are today's classics. So this is "Books that supposedly everyone's supposed to read but have YOU?" but since that is a long title, ah well. Even that said, have you ever even heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies because I haven't. That must be something particular to the person who made the list's crowd.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I don't THINK I'd heard of Guns, Germs, and Steel, but it sounds kind of familiar. For a lot of these, it sounds like the main qualification was simply that the book was long, although that's obviously not the case for all of them. Maybe it was just books that the author(s) of the survey had trouble getting through.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

I don't even think THAT makes them qualify. There are a lot of recent popular titles on here too, which presumably someone who can quote Mark Twain would not find difficult to read... I think maybe it's the "I'm Sick of People Telling Me I Have to Read These Books" List, perhaps.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that makes sense. That would explain how so many books that are trendy among a certain crowd but not particularly long or difficult made it to the list. I mean, I have trouble seeing how anyone could find Slaughterhouse-Five difficult to read, seeing how short and simply-written it is.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

Well it IS rather psychotic (I say that as someone who rather loves Vonnegut!), so I imagine that adds a degree of difficulty actually!

[vovat.livejournal.com]

That's true. I was just thinking of difficulty in terms of writing style and such. Personally, I haven't had much trouble getting through most of Vonnegut's books, but I lost interest in Jailbird after the first few pages. I'm not sure why.

[vilajunkie.livejournal.com]

There's quite a few Neil Gaiman books on that list. I don't consider his work pretentious at all. Nor are they "books that everyone who counts for something in society has read but you" titles. Animal Farm, A Million Little Pieces, and A Purpose Driven Life should be up there, too. Oh, and Sidhharta, because that's a common high school lit book.

[vovat.livejournal.com]

There's quite a few Neil Gaiman books on that list. I don't consider his work pretentious at all. Nor are they "books that everyone who counts for something in society has read but you" titles.

No, but they do seem to be trendy among self-styled intellectuals, which adds credence to rockinlibrarian's theory that it's actually an "I'm Sick of People Telling Me I Have to Read These Books" List.

I remember kind of liking Animal Farm, although the teacher who taught it to us hated it. I was trying to remember if I'd had to read Siddharta for school, but it was actually Damien that I read in my senior year.

[slfcllednowhere.livejournal.com]

You haven't read On the Road or The Catcher in the Rye or Wuthering Heights? Those are three of my favourite books! *shocked*

[vovat.livejournal.com]

I was actually recently talking with bethje about how a lot of high school kids love The Catcher in the Rye. I guess I should probably read it at some point, even though I might have missed doing so at the age when people really seem to respond to it.

[rockinlibrarian.livejournal.com]

I introduced it as the "Ultimate Chronicle of Teen Angst" when I booktalked it to 8th graders. One time after describing it as the "I am so sick of everything in the world including how sick of it I am and including this book itself" book, ALL the kids in the class looked directly at ONE GIRL who immediately stood up and shouted "THAT ONE'S MINE!" That was one of the better moments I had at that school!