Twisted Spinster

Ooh, I want to play:

Beowulf – a verse translation; novelistic versions give me the heebee jeebees. I plan to [GEEK] get a glossed version one of these days. [/GEEK]
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 – not voluntarily – as a high-school assignment.
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger – I did read this after all; it was Ilyka’s mention of the Cure song that reminded me. I had forgotten the actual title to the story. I must say that the works of Camus, like most existentialist (or whatever it was) literature stayed in my mind for about as long as ice cubes stay solid in the sun.
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales – but it’s on my list.
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans – I’ve never been able to read Cooper after reading what Mark Twain had to say about it. I liked the movie, though.
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 – I prefer (the unabridged) Count of Monte Cristo, though.
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 – in German. In high school German class. Ouch.
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies – another high school reading assignment; I normally wouldn’t have touched this with a ten-foot pole.
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 – high school… etc. For some reason our teacher made us focus on the most boring chapter in the book, the one about the chamber inside the whale, what sort of stuff is in a whale, what does it Symbolize… kill me now.
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 – no, instead we read Arms and the Man in that high school English class of mine.
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 – personal note: this was my father’s favorite book, and he was always urging me to read it, and I was always avoiding it, and have done so successfully to this day. So I suppose it is on my list of things to read now.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver’s Travels – now there was a sick man.
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden – high school assignment. He made nature almost boring for me.
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace – I have tried to get through this turgid thing but so far I’ve been stuck like a frozen French soldier in a Russian snowfield on the second chapter.
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five – I didn’t much like this book, despite how it seems to bring out the cuddler in everyone. “Awww, lookit Kurt Vonnegut, he’s so cute!” Yeah, that’s the trouble I have with him.
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass – I was forced to read this in high school. It made me think of Bea Arthur’s deathless cry in Maude: “Shut up, Walter!”
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie – avoiding reading Tennessee Williams plays makes me happy.
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse – avoiding reading anything by Virginia Wolfe also makes me happy.
Wright, Richard - Native Son