Wednesday, 28 January 2009

Compiling A List of Wanna-Reads

Some help compiling your list?

Penguin

LibraryThing

Random House

Listology

My list:
1. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
2. Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart
3. Ismail Kadare, Broken April
4. Charles Bukowski, Tales of Ordinary Madness
5. James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
6. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses
7. Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead or Atlas Shrugged
8. George Orwell, 1984 or Animal Farm
9. Bleak House, Charles Dickens
10. Anything by Thomas Pynchon
11. Sophie's Choice, William Styron
12. Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller
13. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
14. The Sound and The Fury, William Faulkner
15. Herzog, Saul Bellow
16. John Dos Passos, Rosinante to the Road Again

(These last ones, I suspect I am on my own!)
16. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust (SEVEN VOLUMES!!)
17. Ulysses, James Joyce
18. Metamorphoses, Ovid
19. The Border Trilogy, Cormac McCarthy (3 books)
20. The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoeveysky

There is one book I will not regret not reading before I croak.
War and Peace, Tolstoy. Nuh uh. No way. No how.
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6 comments:

  1. Currimbhoy BookClub29 January 2009 at 03:03

    I think we'll pick our list based on which classics or greats get the most mention. If there are no coherences whatsoever, I guess it'd be up to a vote then.

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  2. Samiyah1 February 2009 at 13:03

    All of these seem terrific!

    I will happily read any of them, except for Proust and Ovid. Sorry Elaine, you are definitely on your own there.

    Some of the books I would like to suggest are:

    Lolita- Vladimir Nabokov
    The Bluest Eye- Toni Morrison
    A Clockwork Orange- Anthony Burgess
    The Grapes of Wrath- John Steinbeck
    A Room With a View- E.M Forster
    The Ginger Man- J.P. Donleavy
    As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner
    The Color Purple- Alice Walker

    These are just a few that I've been wanting to read for some time now (although I'm not sure they are considered classics or greats). It would be cool if we could incorporate any into the list, but if not then it's completely fine. I'm really okay with anything.

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  3. Samina1 February 2009 at 14:19

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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  4. Samina1 February 2009 at 14:21

    Some really good suggestions, what we can do is each time look at a different persons list and vote on a book on that list, I suspect there'll be some over laps on everyone's list since this is the 'ultimate classics'! Here are mine, I've been thinking hard about it!

    Top 25
    1. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
    2. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
    3. Crime and punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    4. 1984 or animal farm, by George Orwell
    5. A fine balance or Family matters by Rohinton Mistry
    6. Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses or midnights children (I haven’t read either of them)
    7. Of mice and men or the Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
    8. The autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X or Nelson Mandela autobiography
    9. The communist manifesto by Karl Marx (sorry couldn’t resist but seriously never read it)
    10. A clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
    11. A death of a salesman or a view from the bridge by Arthur Miller
    12. The heart of darkness by Joseph Conrad
    13. One flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
    14. A passage to India by E. M Foster
    15. Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
    16. Arabian Nights/ one thousand and one nights by ANON
    17. THE AGE OF INNOCENCE by Edith Wharton
    18. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett
    19. Kafka on the shore or The wind- up bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
    20. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams
    21. Spy In House Of Love: V4 In Nin'S Continuous Novel - Anais Nin
    22. Breakfast at Tiffany's by Truman Capote
    23. To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee
    24. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
    25. On the road by Jack Kerouac

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  5. Currimbhoy BookClub2 February 2009 at 00:44

    Cool lists! I'll happily read for the first time and some of them, again, and some of them for the third or fourth time (Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence!) any and all of these.

    We've got some overlaps already.

    By the way, Samina, I thought you had already read Wind up Bird Chronicle. I'm about to finish (600 whopping pages), but what a great book. If the ending holds up, it might just become one of my all-time favorite reads, together with Age of Innocence and The Great Gatsby and Cry, My Beloved Country.

    Will either of you mind compiling the overlapping list, Samiyah or Samina?

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  6. Samiyah2 February 2009 at 02:18

    I absolutely loved Wind up Bird Chronicle! I read it about a year ago after a friend recommended it to me and I literally couldn't put it down.

    Anyway, the final list has been compiled and it seems quite promising. I too will happily read any of them. I’m sure we’ve all read at least several books on the list, so do you guys think it would be best to try to read some that none of us have read before? Or will this be near impossible?

    Also, Gone With the Wind still going to be our first book?

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