The 101 Great Books Meme
Yay! Another meme giving me something to blog about. This one is to identify how many of the 101 Great Books Collegeboard.com recommends you have read. Since I graduated from a great books program, one would hope I'd have read more than a few. Let's find out. Ones in bold are ones I've read.
-- Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Austin, Jane Pride and Prejudice It would be especially good if they could manage to spell Jane Austen's name properly on the list.
Baldwin, James Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert The Stranger
Cather, Willa Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de Don Quixote
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
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 Garcia 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 Allen 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
Warton, 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
So I've read 51 out of 101. Pretty much a 50% hit rate. I have actually attempted to read "Crime and Punishment" and "War and Peace" several times before, but I have a tremendous amount of difficulty with Russian literature. It simply does not grab my interest. But as I never finished either of them, I can't count them as books I've read.
Via Michele
Comments
I went through a Russophile stage years ago, so I read a lot of Russian novels and books. I've read 43 of those books on the list. Flannery O'Conner and Eudora Welty are favorites of mine.
There are big holes in my reading, though, starting with the Greek classics. I've tried and failed to read the Odyssey and Iliad.
Posted by: Margot | May 16, 2004 08:44 PM
God, I’m illiterate, only four, Slaughterhouse five, Hamlet, and Pride and Prejudice and Candide (saw the musical too!). Never was much of a fiction fan though.
Posted by: Rick DeMent | May 17, 2004 07:12 PM
Make that six, The Canterbury Tales
Posted by: Rick DeMent | May 17, 2004 07:13 PM
They didn't make you read more of that stuff in school? I had to read 30 of them in various classes before college, and then I read quite a few more in college too.
Posted by: Lesley | May 17, 2004 11:01 PM
About 30 for me.
But I read a lot of the unbolded ones.
Pynchon's Lot 49 is a good introduction to his work. It's short, but that's beause it has no ending.
Amd I thought every teenage girl read The Bell Jar.
Posted by: Just John | May 17, 2004 11:13 PM
Well kind of but not the ones on the list, for example Steinbeck we read "of Mice and Men". I have read almost everything Dickens other then "A Tale of Two Cities".
I read Madam Bovary but only the dirty parts [grin]. in fact I have a volume that has all of the dirty parts form great literature and the carriage scene is great!.
I have read all of the history plays by Shakespeare even the crappy ones.
I have also read Antigone by Sophocles which brings me up to seven.
Mark Twain, a lot particularly his shorter pieces but never Huck Finn (go figure).
I read a few by Faulkner like “The Reivers”, and "As I lay Dying" but not the "Sound and Fury".
I also took an number of Japanese lit and it's kind of weird that "Tale of Ganji" doesn’t make the list given its historical importance.
That's why I was a bit astounded by the list; I have considered myself pretty well read but now I’m not so sure.
I guess I'm just king of the "B" sides.
Posted by: Rick DeMent | May 18, 2004 11:20 AM
oh Beowulf, also helped write and starred in a musical based on that [grin], pretty hysterical too!
8
Posted by: Rick DeMent | May 18, 2004 11:23 AM
Here's a taster selection of 101 books...
http://www.101cookbooks.com/
Posted by: jillian | May 18, 2004 02:32 PM
test
Posted by: Abby Hoffman | May 19, 2004 12:49 AM