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Archive for the ‘current reading’ Category

College Board’s 101 greatest literary works

Friday, July 29th, 2005

Compare with this entry to get a sense of what I've read over the last year or so.

As before, entries in bold are books I've read; entries in italics are books I've started or read a portion of.

– 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

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recent reading

Friday, May 13th, 2005

Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization.

Bederman explores the invention of "masculinity" (as opposed to "manhood") at the beginning of the twentieth century, and its relationship to race. Fascinating book.

WEB DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk.

If you haven't read it, read it.

Hamilton Holt and Werner Sollors, The Life Stories of Undistinguished Americans as Told by Themselves.

This is a collection of "lifelets," or short personal narratives, by immigrants, blacks, southerners, and other Americans from the early part of the twentieth century. The narratives were published in 1906. Pretty amazing stuff, especially those narratives that were written by their narrators and still contain grammatical errors and turn-of-the-century vernacular.

Matthew Frye Jacobson, Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy of Race.

Interesting analysis of immigration at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms.

Yes yes, you've read it. I know. We've all read it at least one too many times.

Nella Larsen, Quicksand and Passing.

Nella Larsen was a mixed-race writer during the Harlem Renaissance. Quicksand is, for me, a foreshadowing of post-war fiction - her style, by turns elegant, terse and absurd, is incredible. There are places where she sounds like Sylvia Plath, thirty years before Plath did.

Both Quicksand and Passing are about the "color line." They deal with the difficulties of mixed-race people (the "tragic mulatto") in the twentieth century. Passing is particularly striking, though Quicksand is probably the better of the two.

Josephine Johnson, Now in November.

Now in November is a Depression-era rural novel. It's a short, dense work, full of poetry and a love of nature. It's pretty good, though I wouldn't rave about it.

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

In my small opinion, one of the best American novels ever written.

J. D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey.

Yeah, I know everyone loves Salinger, but he irritates my poetic sensibility. I would read a paragraph and shout, "You could have said that in one sentence, you long-winded asshole!" And then there's the question of privilege. After reading Larsen and Johnson, I had little sympathy for the problems of the elite.

Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun.

James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room and The Fire Next Time.

Giovanni's Room is incredibly well-written. Baldwin is a master.

Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior.

Parts of this book are astonishingly courageous. And then, parts of it are overwritten.

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49.

Speaking of overwritten and overwrought … I actually really loved this novel, though Pynchon's insistence on proving his cleverness to me grew increasingly more irritating. The ending, however, is gorgeous and operatic.

Sandra Cisneros, The House on Mango Street.

This is another beautifully written book. I preferred it over The Woman Warrior. Small vignettes, lots of terrifying white space, a clarity and simplicity of voice that packs such a density of meaning.

And then there's all the Larry Levis (The Dollmaker's Ghost, The Widening Spell of Leaves, etc), Lu Chi, random papers and essays, on and on and on.

I need a nap.

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this and that

Tuesday, June 25th, 2002

From this search, after brilliant LH:

Preston is located at the very heart of the north west of England in the County of Lancashire. Preston is also associated with the history of the Beatles in many ways. PRESTON IS AN AWARD-WINNING NATURE PHOTOGRAPHER. Preston is in jail serving a 3-year prison term for bail violation. Preston is demonstrative as a lover. Preston is President and CEO of Atomic Ordered Materials, AOM, Chairman of Quantum Energy Technologies Corp. Do you think Preston is cool enough then? I think Preston is definitely getting there.

(I should use this as my official bio.)

Current reading:

Tim O'Brien, Going After Cacciato
William Everson (poems)
Thomas McGrath, Letter to an Imaginary Friend

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