(blogging meme found somewhere or other)
Reproduce the following list of titles and bold those which you've read.

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
Brontλ, Charlotte — Jane Eyre
Brontλ, 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 Garcνa — 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


posted by kristin at 11:16 AM

Purchased last weekend in New York:
Margaret Atwood - Oryx and Crake
Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red

I was very surprised at the dearth of small independent bookstores around town. I went to the Strand, because I felt I had to, but it doesn't really compare with Powells. If there's a neighborhood around that has many other bookstores, I didn't find it. I did run into the New York Antiquarian Book Fair though. Out of my price league but nice to browse.

So in the past couple of weeks, I haven't blogged, but I have kept reading. Like the rest of the series Islam for Beginners was worth the read. An introduction rather than a deep look at the history of Islam, but I feel like I learned something.

I read Underworld last weekend. Airports, airplanes, and then my friend's apartment. I left it with him so I wouldn't have to carry it home. It's big, thick, but interesting and didn't take 400 pages to get into like some books that big do. I noticed landmarks from the novel around New York as I was wandering.

The Quiet American by Graham Greene made me feel a bit like a stupid American. I don't know that I'd known the level of war going on in Vietnam before the US got involved. A short novel worth reading.

Zeitgeist by Bruce Sterling was ok, but not as interesting as his earlier works. I'm not quite sure what about it bugged me, but something did, though it was quite readable. I'd read his article in Wired about Turkish Cyprus a few years back so understood some of the background. I think part of the problem I had is that I found the non-fiction article more interesting than the novel. I want the blowup plane though!

The Tummy Trilogy by Calvin Trillin is a book (well 3 combined really) of essays about eating and travel. In that order. He's food obsessed and I mean that in a good way.
posted by kristin at 1:16 PM

Arrived today:

Meet me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich (highly recommended by Richard Morgan when he spoke at Powells)
The Confusion by Neal Stephenson (yes, it's about as big as Quicksilver)
posted by kristin at 10:46 PM

I have to say that while I like Ryu Murakami's books, I don't like them as well as Haruki Murakami's. That said, 69 was an enjoyable, if sometimes painful, view of the life of a 17-year-old in 1969. I say painful not because of any flaw in the writing, merely because the main character has a tendency to do the kind of dumb things most people do at 17 and hope to forget about later.

Richard Morgan's Altered Carbon was sometimes bleak but well worth the read. I figured I really ought to read it after seeing him speak a few weeks ago. Amusingly, I'd mentioned the title to my dad figuring he might like it as well and he also read it this week. (And also liked it). Near-future, semi-thriller, has a hotel based on Jimi Hendrix as a character. I'll have to read the sequel, Broken Angels, soon.
posted by kristin at 10:19 AM

Right before I left for LA, I finally finished Chaim Potok's Wandering. I'd have to say I like his novels better, but for a nearly 600 page book about the Jews throughout history it was fairly interesting. I read this one on the train over the span of a month or so.

On the plane I read Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto. It's the first of hers that I've read, and I believe the first she wrote. The book contains 3 novellas, two of which are linked. It was a bit surprising to start the third expecting more of the same story only to have it drastically shift on me. Decent overall, but I wasn't entirely overwhelmed. I'll have to read some of her later work and see how she's matured.

Next up was Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain. A friend had been bugging me to read it for at least a year, and his urging was warranted. Parts made me a bit nervous about eating out, or at least ever requesting anything on the side.

On the way home I read Mark Salzman's The Laughing Sutra. It reminded me the most of Barry Hughart's Bridge of Birds except set in the modern day.
posted by kristin at 12:16 PM