Ganked from vivian_shaw...

[camwyn]

Apparently, someone says these are the hundred and one greatest works of lit available int he English language or something. The meme is to bold the ones you've read.

Me, I'm bolding the ones I've read, underlining the ones I liked, and italicizing the ones that annoyed me.



Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart - I only dimly remember this one. Read it sometime in college. Wasn't too bad.

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 - Existentialism. Bah. Get off your ass and go look, man. Either that, or accept that he's coming and that he'll find you, if you're doing the god metaphor thing. Some of us are of the opinion that he's already with us and sitting around waiting for him won't- why am I ranting at an author who can't even hear me?

Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger - Didn't like this one, but it escaped an Annoying rating because when we read it for school, the two girls who had to present it for the class did their presentation with the opening segment of Billy Joel's "The Stranger" playing. The whistling bit fit in nicely. Then Billy started singing and Mrs. O'Sullivan just went 'buh?'. It was great. The book itself irritated me.

Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales- Started. Never finished. Alas.

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 - A-HEM. If all you read is the Inferno you are TOTALLY CHEATING YOURSELF out of one kick-ass literary/theological experience. I mean, yeah, you'll almost certainly find fault with Dante's assignment of the magnitudes of sin and virtue, because you have modern sensibilities and he doesn't, but the Inferno is just the gory gross bits. The Purgatorio and the Paradiso are what make this worth reading. The whole thing is the unfolding of the poet's spiritual progress and understanding of the true nature of love, both human and divine, and if all you're reading it for is the part where people have their genitalia devoured by lizards or whatever, you really need to read the rest.
(Even if it's only for the bit where you find out about the legend that one of the more virtuous popes prayed for one of the Roman emperors to be resurrected so he could be baptized and saved before dying again, and that while God did this, he apparently had an angel tell the pope in question, "DON'T YOU EVER DO THAT AGAIN!!!". Seriously.)

de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities - Mother of Mercy, I could not get past the first fifty pages. It just... it... it was the same three pages over and over, practically... *shiver*
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment - mmmmmm. Russian psychological messiness. Symbolically meaningful names. Mmm, baby.

Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers - So totally better than the movies.

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 - I dimly recall having to read this in high school. I more clearly recall faking it, because I couldn't wedge my mind through the Faulkner in the way that one cannot wedge a Pontiac through a letter-delivery slot.

Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary -AUGH. AUGH AUGH AUGH. You stupid, idiotic, WITLESS woman. YOU are possibly the most self-centred little brat I have ever been forced to read about under the guise of Masterpieces of Continental Fiction class. Is there anything about you in which an intelligent, self-sufficient woman (or one who is trying to be so) may find resonance? You're almost as unlikable as the characters in "Memento"! Argh.

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 - Not annoying, but was I supposed to like anybody in this book? Because I didn't.

Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey - Look, mommy! A Greek hero more famous for his wit and intelligence than his awesome musckles! Okay, yeah, he did have them, but STILL! And the bit with his dog! *sniffle* I still admire that ol' pooch... anyway, yeah, Odyssey good.

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 American
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man - I... tried to read some Joyce. Was it this? I don't remember. It was for school. I blithered a lot and the teacher gave up on getting the info out of me.
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 - Frozen north, open wilderness, and great big shaggy dogs... *happy sigh*

Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick - Tried. Didn't get far. Liked the whaling bits but never got past about chapter fourteen. Wound up v. impressed by Patrick Stewart's Ahab when I watched this on dvd, though.
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 - I do believe I pulled my first fanficcing ever on this, though it was never written down. It went: "Shortly after the end of the events chronicled, the pigs discovered to their horror that there had been a few diseases that only human beings could contract. As they were no longer distinguishable from the two-leggers, they came down with several of these diseases, died horribly, and left the bewildered farm animals leaderless, at which point half of them escaped and the others went back to their old lives of servitude. The end."

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 - *dribble* Mommy like. Then again, Mommy also summarize.

Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein - Got a copy here. Haven't gotten far in it yet.
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone - I still maintain Kreon was the tragic hero. Antigone didn't learn a goddamn thing or change one stinkin' bit during the whole play. Kreon? Kreon lost everything and learned just how wrong he was.

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

... that's it? These are the most noteworthy or best or whatever? Excuse me, but Maxine Hong Kingston is not the only Chinese person to write a really feckin' important work of literature! Do not make me come over there and hit you over the head with all four volumes of my annotated Journey to the West!

Comments

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

I'll have to do this meme when I get home. In the meantime, have you seen the Three/Four Musketeers? They actually come very close to living up to the book.

[temporal-tech.livejournal.com]

Sophocles - Antigone - I still maintain Kreon was the tragic hero. Antigone didn't learn a goddamn thing or change one stinkin' bit during the whole play. Kreon? Kreon lost everything and learned just how wrong he was.

my english teacher was very angry at me for arguing this point.

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

Want to see someone's head explode? Find someone who's only seen the Disney version of the Three Muskateers and then tell them the ending to the book. Of course, I always liked Count of Monte Cristo better.

[amaresu]

*raises hand* How's the book end?



I've also seen The Muskateer, a martial arts film that came out about five years ago. It was pretty and every fight scene envolved barrels.

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

Cardinal Richelieu gives D'Artagnan a lieutenant's commission in the Musketeers, iirc.

[terrie01.livejournal.com]

No, I think it was just the regular guard, since you need to serve there first.

[camwyn]

What gets me is that I saw the Disney version first, then read the book- and several of the parts that I thought for sure were thrown in by those wacky Disney writers were in the original (most notably, the duel scheduling scene and ensuing fallout. On the other hand, the whole Inigo Montoya motif wasn't there given that it was D'artagnan's dad who sent him off to join the Musketeers to begin with....

[fuchsoid.livejournal.com]

Nice to see I'm not the only one who wanted to slap Madame Bovary.

They do seem to have been oddly selective in the translations they list. From an English point of view, this seems rather heavily weighted with relatively new American books, too. Also, A Tale of Two Cities, rather than Oliver Twist? that's just perverse.

[camwyn]

Emma Bovary was one of those characters who make me ashamed to be female. I laid into her pretty savagely on the final exam, and that involved comparing her to Anna Karenina. I didn't like Anna much either, but from what I recall, she had at least a little more of a grasp of the real world than Bovary did.

I'm pretty sure I saw this list on the BBC's site at some point and that it attracted the same kinds of criticisms- hardly any non-Commonwealth authors, virtually all White authors, weirdly chronologically skewed, etc. Feh.

[condotierre.livejournal.com]

Might do this later, Og, but --I suppose it should -scare- me that even if I haven't actually read or remembered some of those I did read, there's only maybe...about 10 or so of those on the list? Given I didn't like...grow UP with those books and they swam into my ken during college in VA I suppose I haven't neglected things -too- badly.

And yes. YES, I agree with the last sentiment - *holds up Romance of the Three Kingdoms, all three thick unabridged Mandarin volumes* THAT'S what you call CLASSIC, just like Journey to the West! Or the 'Shi Ji'! Or, heck, the Tao Te Ching!

(We shan't mention the infamous Dream of the Red Chamber, even if it counts, because we do not like this, oh no, we do not.)

[camwyn]

I think they were only counting fiction for this, so we have to givet hem a pass on Sima Qian and the Tao Te Ching.

We shan't mention the infamous Dream of the Red Chamber

Hssss! We hates it, Precious! Nasssty, dissolute wretchesss, nothing crunchable at all! We hates the Red Chamber, we hates it forever!

[condotierre.livejournal.com]

I did tell you that one of my teachers in high school almost made that mandatory reading for us didn't I? Maybe not, actually. Thankfully, she did not (thankfully good sense prevailed) or I think I would have rebelled in an outright measure of defiance and rewritten Romance of the Three Kingdoms to be populated with Jia Bao-Yu villains in an attempt to even things out and score a point.

Presumably that -really- would have landed me in to even where Monkey would just rather dig a hole, I think.

[lyorn.livejournal.com]

I read about 25 of it and can remember barely 10: The other I read as a kid or teenager, not because we read them in school (the only one on the list we read in school was "Faust", and that I liked), but because they were marketed to teenagers. And they meant exactly zilch to me, so I can't even remember if I liked them.

The ones I read most recently were "The Great Gatsby", which would have been greatly improved if a bunch of aliens had landed on page 10 and killed every character, and "Heart of Darkness", which was really good.