ok, forget studying lit. maybe. for now.
because tonight I went to writers.com to see what they had upcoming for january, if I’m a good girl and save my pennies, and OH man, do they have what I need:
some good basics to get me started, or better yet, fired up. i am so THERE
My 2nd meme, this one courtesy of Addofio.
The below listed books are the top 106 books most often marked as being “unread” by LibraryThing users.
The instructions are simple:
Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your TBR list.
? If you’ve never heard of it.
Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell TBR
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22 TBR
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice**
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies?
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin?
The Kite Runner TBR
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex TBR
Quicksilver ?
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man ?
Love in the Time of Cholera TBR (I may have read it, long time ago.)
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys TBR
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984**
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility**
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse ?
Tess of the D’Urbervilles (in high school, maybe?)
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections ?
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay ?
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury ?
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things ?
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present ?
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything ?
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves ?
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake ?
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed ?
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion?
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth?
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers
Not long ago, I was reading a book review over at my friend Katrina’s site and I realized that I think I need to study literature. She was describing a recently written novel that pays homage to Victorian Literature and post modernism, which sounded JUST like my cup of tea. She remarked that the ending was not resolved and that a careful reader can posit one. Careless readers will miss subtle clues throughout.
Well, I think that once upon a time, maybe 20 years ago, I was a careful reader. Or maybe not. I did a VERY brief stint in Columbia University once, and they forced me to retake College English II (maybe it’s now called College Comp II, it’s your intro to lit course). I was fuming because I’d taken as many English courses at my technical college as I could and aced them all, and this one course… Let’s just say my kept DROPPING every week. I always have said that it felt like the entire class was taking another class together and knew things I didn’t. (Perhaps their English I???? Hm, never occured to me.) Anyhow, it put me off of lit courses for good - this from the girl who had taken Honors English for 4 years of high school and won an award -for studying classics like “Siddhartha”.
OK, so it may be that my ego wanted that memory. But I have since that time become a careless reader. The pleasure was SUCKED OUT of my favorite thing to do in life (reading) and perhaps even a part of me skimmed over the concept that literature could have value. I’ve even read my share of literature on my own but I sacrifice all deeper meaning to the pleasure of the story.
So now I have it in my head that perhaps I need to learn to study literature. I also have it in my head that this will buoy up my writing. I do not have time for careful reading, but returning to school - well, one of these days anyway - that will do the trick.
Maybe.