So I finally got around to doing the book tag from Michi. I do believe the books you've read, aim to read, gave up on and plan to leave alone say a lot about you. Better than taking a subjective personality test, which folks should allow a new acquaintance to answer for them.
So, here goes. I grouped my books at the top because I felt like that.
I also added a new notation: the * asterisk is for books begun and never finished.
The other notations are:
Bold for books you've read
Italics for books you want to read
(Parentheses for books you've never heard of)
Underline the ones on your shelf
No notation at all denotes neutrality
This list was getting pretty unwieldy. So, to cut down the potential boredom factor, I trimmed a few titles at random.
Independence Day – Richard Ford
Pastoralia – George Saunders
Middlemarch – George Eliot
Parallel Universes – Roz Chast
Bastard out of Carolina – Dorothy Allison
The Drowned and the Saved – Primo Levi
The Seven Storey Mountain – Thomas Merton
Excellent Cadavers – Alexander Steele
Hitler’s Pope – John Cornwell
No Direction Home: The Life and Music of Bob Dylan – Robert Shelton
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard
The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
(His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman)
The Life of Pi - Yann Martel*
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Catch 22 - Joseph Heller*
The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
Lord of the Flies - William Golding
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
1984 - George Orwell*
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
Slaughterhouse 5 - Kurt Vonnegut
The Secret History - Donna Tartt
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides
(Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell)
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Atonement - Ian McEwan
(The Shadow of The Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Sula by Toni Morrison
The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
White Teeth by Zadie Smith
The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy
Disgrace - JM Coetzee
Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
(The Buddha of Suburbia - Hanif Kureishi)
Titus Groan - Mervyn Peake
Ivanhoe - Walter Scott
Patrick Suskind - Perfume
Bernand Shlink - The Reader*
(Father and Son - Larry Brown)
Postcards - E. Annie Proulx
A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain (stories) - Robert Olen Butler
(Defiance - Carole Maso)
(Being Dead - Jim Crace)
(And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos, by John Berger)
Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard
Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow*
The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus
The Last of the Just by Andre Schwartz-Bart*
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
A Bell for Adano by John Hersey
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Herzog by Saul Bellow
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy*
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott*
Anton Chekhov's Short Stories - Anton Chekhov
(The Mistress of Spices - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni)
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyesvki*
Grendel - John Gardner
A River Runs Through It and other stories - Norman Maclean
(The Worst Journey in the World - Apsley Cherry-Garrard)
The little prince - antoine de saint-exupéry
Lolita - vladimir nabokov*
Making Love - marius brill
(Metamagical themas - douglas hofstadter)
(Neverwhere - neil gaiman)
A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
Kassandra - Christa Wolf
Alice in Wonderland
Women who Run with Wolves - Clarissa Pinkola Estes
Mother Tongue - Bill Bryson
View with a Grain of Sand - wislawa szymborska
3 comments:
hey, great that you got around to doing it after all! :)
are you one of these people who can't help but check out the bookshelves in a home you visit for the first time? i always do that. and the music, of course.
off your list, i have only read middlemarch, and i am currently reading a primo levi book, though a different one, the periodic table.
great idea to introduce the never finished category - although there are not that many books i never finished: ulysses, finnegan's wake, kassandra when i tried it the first time (now i have read it 6 times, and love it), ivanhoe the first time, a la recherche du temps perdu (ugh!!), and a book called oblomov or some such. though there might have been another one or two i cannot recall right now.
what did you think of coetzee's disgrace? it's on my wish list.
m aka zymoegp
"Disgrace" is one of my favorite books ever.
Like dogs who sniff around each other on first meeting, yes, I always look at people's bookshelves first, and I figure if they mind me looking then we will not mix well. The absolute worst thing that could happen is to go to someone's house for the first time and not see a book anywhere. I swear to god, it actually makes me afraid.
I look at the music, too, and am frequently astounded!
thanks sarah, i'll get the book eventually, i'm sure. just ordered a few other ones, sigh, even though i keep telling myself to read the ones i already have first. as if i ever listened to myself! ;)
i don't think i have ever been anywhere where there aren't any books. but that would make me feel very worried too.
m
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