I used to work in a bookshop, I used to be able to talk about current books and authors with some semblance of knowledge ( and/or berate people for reading whatever the masses were consuming at the time ) I used to have a pile of books that actually got read. So in short I was an ass.
Now I am a mum. And I work. A lot.
The last book I read was “the Monster at the end of This Book” by Jon Stone. And that is because it was piffed at my head by my 18 month old son with a demand of “up?!” It must be known that I love this book – my Grandma used to read it to me when I was little and I still hear her everytime I read it out loud. But it would be nice to read something that didn’t rhyme ( or if it does – it does well! )
I spent weeks looking for a list that might be interesting for me to have a red hot go at and much to my dismay – the Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge kept popping up. And what is more upsetting – I was super interested in giving this list a jolly good nudge… So here we go. I took the list – shoved it into a randomizer and I will attempt in the order below.
Let it be known now – the classics freak me out – I am more of a modern lit person but I am nothing if not a self flagellating goal setter. I am also new at this blogging thing so sorry if I make any embarrassing errors. Goal setting blogs seem self indulgent to me but why the hell not – everyone else is doing it! I will blog with my thoughts or lack thereof with each novel
Wish me luck – I am going to need it…
There were 341 items in your list. Here they are in random order:
- Marathon Man by William Goldman
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
- Othello by Shakespeare
- When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka
- In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (TBR)
- War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
- The Art of War by Sun Tzu
- The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
- Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
- Monsieur Proust by Celeste Albaret
- The Mojo Collection: The Ultimate Music Companion by Jim Irvin
- Henry V by William Shakespeare
- The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
- What Happened to Baby Jane by Henry Farrell
- Swann’s Way by Marcel Proust
- S Is for Silence by Sue Grafton
- Extravagance by Gary Krist
- Rescuing Patty Hearst: Memories From a Decade Gone Mad by Virginia Holman
- Rosemary’s Baby by Ira Levin
- The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
- The Crucible by Arthur Miller
- A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
- Deenie by Judy Blume
- Tender Is The Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Nickel and Dimed by Barbara Ehrenreich
- Babe by Dick King-Smith
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- Henry IV, part I by William Shakespeare
- A Quiet Storm by Rachel Howzell Hall
- Term of Endearment by Larry McMurtry
- Carrie by Stephen King
- The Holy Barbarians by Lawrence Lipton
- Old School by Tobias Wolff
- Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
- The Nanny Diaries by Emma McLaughlin
- The Story of My Life by Helen Keller
- Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground and Nico (Thirty Three and a Third series) by Joe Harvard
- The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco (TBR)
- Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare
- The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
- The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford
- Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling
- Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales & Poems by Edgar Allan Poe
- Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
- Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse
- The Rough Guide to Europe, 2003 Edition
- The Merry Wives of Windsro by William Shakespeare
- A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
- The Little Locksmith by Katharine Butler Hathaway
- Franny and Zooey by J. D. Salinger
- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
- The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafon
- Robert’s Rules of Order by Henry Robert
- The Fellowship of the Ring: Book 1 of The Lord of the Ring by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
- George W. Bushism: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit and Wisdom of our 43rd President by Jacob Weisberg
- Seabiscuit: An American Legend by Laura Hillenbrand
- Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
- The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan
- Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce
- Ethics by Spinoza
- High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
- A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
- Lord of the Flies by William Golding
- Oracle Night by Paul Auster
- Song of the Simple Truth: The Complete Poems of Julia de Burgos by Julia de Burgos
- Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
- The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
- Snows of Kilimanjaro by Ernest Hemingway
- I’m with the Band by Pamela des Barres (TBR)
- The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism by William E. Cain, Laurie A. Finke, Barbara E. Johnson, John P. McGowan
- Demons by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
- The Love Story by Erich Segal
- The Miracle Worker by William Gibson
- Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (TBR)
- The Godfather: Book 1 by Mario Puzo
- Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain
- The Portable Nietzche by Fredrich Nietzche
- A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
- To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (TBR)
- The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
- How to Breathe Underwater by Julie Orringer
- Lady Chatterleys’ Lover by D. H. Lawrence
- The Return of the King: The Lord of the Rings Book 3 by J. R. R. Tolkien (TBR)
- David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
- Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them by Al Franken
- Nervous System: Or, Losing My Mind in Literature by Jan Lars Jensen
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- Archidamian War by Donald Kagan
- The Graduate by Charles Webb
- Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain
- Complete Novels by Dawn Powell
- The Vanishing Newspaper by Philip Meyers
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books by Azar Nafisi
- Snow White and Rose Red by Grimm Brothers
- A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf
- The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
- Living History by Hillary Rodham Clinton
- The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy
- Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
- Shane by Jack Shaefer
- The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life by Amy Tan
- Sanctuary by William Faulkner
- The Manticore by Robertson Davies
- Fletch by Gregory McDonald
- Unless by Carol Shields
- Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman
- Macbeth by William Shakespeare
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
- Several Biographies of Winston Churchill
- The True and Outstanding Adventures of the Hunt Sisters by Elisabeth Robinson
- The Last Empire: Essays 1992-2000 by Gore Vidal
- A Separate Peace by John Knowles
- New Poems of Emily Dickinson by Emily Dickinson
- Howl by Allen Gingsburg
- The Awakening by Kate Chopin
- Slaughter-house Five by Kurt Vonnegut
- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Maguire
- Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
- Novels 1930-1942: Dance Night/Come Back to Sorrento, Turn, Magic Wheel/Angels on Toast/A Time to be Born by Dawn Powell
- The Group by Mary McCarthy
- The Gospel According to Judy Bloom
- Eva Luna by Isabel Allende
- Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
- Rita Hayworth by Stephen King
- The Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood by Rebecca Wells
- Daughter of Fortune by Isabel Allende
- Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas p�re
- Emma by Jane Austen
- The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby
- Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
- Night by Elie Wiesel
- Beowulf: A New Verse Translation by Seamus Heaney
- The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
- Christine by Stephen King
- Time and Again by Jack Finney
- As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
- The Portable Dorothy Parker by Dorothy Parker
- Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
- Quattrocento by James Mckean
- Selected Hotels of Europe
- Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
- The Crimson Petal and the White by Michel Faber (TBR)
- The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton
- Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
- The Kitchen Boy: A Novel of the Last Tsar by Robert Alexander
- Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Bielski Brothers: The True Story of Three Men Who Defied the Nazis, Built a Village in the Forest, and Saved 1,200 Jews by Peter Duffy
- One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
- Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (TBR)
- Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White
- Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach
- Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
- House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III (Lpr)
- Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront� (TBR)
- Fiddler on the Roof by Joseph Stein
- Sophie’s Choice by William Styron
- Pushkin: A Biography by T. J. Binyon
- Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
- Cujo by Stephen King
- Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
- The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger (TBR)
- Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (TBR)
- A Streetcar Named Desiree by Tennessee Williams
- Swimming with Giants: My Encounters with Whales, Dolphins and Seals by Anne Collett
- Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
- Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
- The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
- A Bolt from the Blue and Other Essays by Mary McCarthy
- Myra Waldo’s Travel and Motoring Guide to Europe, 1978 by Myra Waldo
- The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O’Neill by Ron Suskind
- Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
- Small Island by Andrea Levy
- The Meaning of Consuelo by Judith Ortiz Cofer
- The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen
- Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman by William Tecumseh Sherman
- Autobiography of a Face by Lucy Grealy
- The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
- The Trial by Franz Kafka
- Roman Holiday by Edith Wharton
- Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
- Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bront�
- Henry IV, part II by William Shakespeare
- How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Seuss
- The Divine Comedy by Dante
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky
- Freaky Friday by Mary Rodgers
- Walt Disney’s Bambi by Felix Salten
- A Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare
- The Scarecrow of Oz by Frank L. Baum
- Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
- Candide by Voltaire
- Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann
- Out of Africa by Isac Dineson (TBR)
- Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi
- The Song Reader by Lisa Tucker
- Ethan Frome by Edith Wharton
- Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith (TBR)
- Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky (TBR)
- Encyclopedia Brown: Boy Detective by Donald J. Sobol
- Iron Weed by William J. Kennedy
- Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov
- A Room with a View by E. M. Forster
- Just a Couple of Days by Tony Vigorito
- It Takes a Village by Hillary Clinton
- The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings
- Walden by Henry David Thoreau
- Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
- The Shining by Stephen King
- The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
- Mencken’s Chrestomathy by H. R. Mencken
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
- Gender Trouble by Judith Butler
- The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon
- Sexus by Henry Miller
- Fahrenheit 9/11 by Michael Moore
- The Song of Names by Norman Lebrecht
- Inherit the Wind by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee
- Who Moved My Cheese? Spencer Johnson
- The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
- Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
- Complete Stories by Dorothy Parker
- The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath (TBR)
- The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides
- Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (TBR)
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- Holidays on Ice: Stories by David Sedaris
- What Colour is Your Parachute? 2005 by Richard Nelson Bolles
- Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf by Edward Albee
- A Monetary History of the United States by Milton Friedman
- Sonnets from the Portuegese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning
- Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World by Greg Critser
- David and Lisa by Dr Theodore Issac Rubin M.D
- Empire Falls by Richard Russo
- The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band by Tommy Lee, Vince Neil, Mick Mars and Nikki Sixx
- The New Way Things Work by David Macaulay
- The Tragedy of Richard III by William Shakespeare
- The Peace of Nicias and the Sicilian Expedition by Donald Kagan
- A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
- The Iliad by Homer
- Say Goodbye to Daisy Miller by Henry James
- Moby Dick by Herman Melville
- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
- Peyton Place by Grace Metalious
- Life of Pi by Yann Martel
- The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Sylvia Plath (TBR)
- Stuart Little by E. B. White
- The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo (TBR)
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters by Mark Dunn
- Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (TBR)
- The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
- Gidget by Fredrick Kohner
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell (TBR)
- The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd (TBR)
- To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway
- On the Road by Jack Kerouac
- The Lottery: And Other Stories by Shirley Jackson
- We Owe You Nothing – Punk Planet: The Collected Interviews edited by Daniel Sinker
- The Collected Short Stories by Eudora Welty
- A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
- The Fall of the Athenian Empire by Donald Kagan
- Driving Miss Daisy by Alfred Uhrv
- Rapunzel by Grimm Brothers
- The Wizard of Oz by Frank L. Baum
- Sacred Time by Ursula Hegi
- The Jumping Frog by Mark Twain
- Bridgadoon by Alan Jay Lerner
- Hamlet by William Shakespeare
- The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
- The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty by Eudora Welty
- How the Light Gets in by M. J. Hyland
- The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
- The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende (TBR)
- The Children’s Hour by Lillian Hellman
- Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women by Elizabeth Wurtzel
- Cousin Bette by Honor’e de Balzac
- The Outbreak of the Peloponnesian War by Donald Kagan
- My Sister’s Keeper by Jodi Picoult
- Moliere: A Biography by Hobart Chatfield Taylor
- Don Quijote by Cervantes
- The Red Tent by Anita Diamant
- Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett
- Songbook by Nick Hornby
- My Life as Author and Editor by H. R. Mencken
- Goldilocks and the Three Bears by Alvin Granowsky
- Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
- Atonement by Ian McEwan
- Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- The Five People You Meet in Heaven by Mitch Albom
- Inferno by Dante
- Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
- Property by Valerie Martin
- Emily the Strange by Roger Reger
- Helter Skelter: The True Story of the Manson Murders by Vincent Bugliosi and Curt Gentry (TBR)
- The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe
- Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie
- An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
- The Sonnets by William Shakespeare
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World by Barrington Moore
- Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke
- Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay by Nancy Milford
- The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir
- The Art of Fiction by Henry James
- Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens
- Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
- Selected Letters of Dawn Powell: 1913-1965 by Dawn Powell
- Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom
- Ulysses by James Joyce
- One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- The Bhagava Gita
- My Life in Orange: Growing Up with the Guru by Tim Guest
- The Legend of Bagger Vance by Steven Pressfield
- Eloise by Kay Thompson
- Europe through the Back Door, 2003 by Rick Steves
- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway
- The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
- The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (TBR)
- Notes of a Dirty Old Man by Charles Bukowski
- Eleanor Roosevelt by Blanche Wiesen Cook
- Truth & Beauty: A Friendship by Ann Patchett
- Beloved by Toni Morrison
- The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson
- A Month Of Sundays: Searching For The Spirit And My Sister by Julie Mars
- Little Dorrit by Charles Dickens
- Brick Lane by Monica Ali
- The Da Vinci -Code by Dan Brown
- R Is for Ricochet by Sue Grafton
- Sybil by Flora Rheta Schreiber
- My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and It’s Aftermath by Seymour M. Hersh
- Pigs at the Trough by Arianna Huffington
Merrily we read along... 