And now the American version...

Also 'stolen' from Jenica, this is the College Board's list.

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
Bronte, Charlotte - Jane Eyre see previous entry
Bronte, Emily - Wuthering Heights see previous entry
Camus, Albert - The Stranger assigned
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Cervantes, Miguel de - Don Quixote
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales If not all, a good portion of them, in high school, looking for the dirty bits.
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening One of my favorite books
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness assigned
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans I'm marking this because I tried really really hard to read this, and just hated every word; think I made it halfway before telling the prof I'd rather have the 'F' than read more of it.
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno Love it
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities assigned
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment assigned
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass I think...?
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss assigned
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man assigned
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays Well, this is a bit vague, don't you think?? Did I read the 'correct' ones?
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby see previous entry
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary assigned
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann - Wolfgang von Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies see previous entry
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles assigned
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter assigned
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22 see previous entry
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 see previous entry
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw assigned
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis assigned (I've actually been feeling a little metamorphed lately...)
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 Garcia - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick see previous entry
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible assigned, but loved it
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night I think...?
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago oh oh oh, I looooove this book...oh boy Omar Sharif, Julie Christie...sniff
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allen - Selected Tales
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front assigned, but I should reread it since I liked it so much; wonder if GWB has read this?? or Rummy??
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 assigned
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion [Does "My Fair Lady" count? I have all the songs memorized--"In Hertford, Hereford and Hampshire/Hurricanes hardly happen/"How kind of you to let me come"...]
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone assigned
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex assigned
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath This is another one I loathed, and eventually took the 'F' rather than finishing it.
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels (uhm, listening to an unabridged recording counts, right?)Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden assigned
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn assigned
Voltaire - Candide I think...?
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five ...but I don't remember much of it...
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Warton, Edith - The House of Mirth assigned
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass assigned
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie assigned
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse assigned, should read again
Wright, Richard - Native Son

The Guardian's best books list

...via Jenica...
I've read those highlighted.

1. Don Quixote Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress John Bunyan I'm giving myself credit for this, even though I read the children's version: I read it about 12 times before I turned 10.
3. Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield Charles Dickensassigned
17. Wuthering Heights Emily Bronte assigned but I've read it about 4 times since then
18. Jane Eyre Charlotte Bronte assigned, but read it several times since then, once on a train in Siberia
19. Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter Nathaniel Hawthorne assigned, repeatedly
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville assigned, but didn't read the last 80 pages or so
22. Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert assigned
23. The Woman in White Wilkie Collins I think??
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland Lewis Carroll see my reading list elsewhere
25. Little Women Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now Anthony Trollope
27. Anna Karenina Leo Tolstoy
28. Daniel Deronda George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov Fyodor Dostoevsky assigned
30. The Portrait of a Lady Henry James assigned; I should read this again
31. Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain assigned
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild Jack London
39. Nostromo Joseph Conrad
40. The Wind in the Willows Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan
45. Ulysses James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway Virginia Woolf assigned
47. A Passage to India E. M. Forster
48. The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald assigned; I love this book!
49. The Trial Franz Kafka assigned
50. Men Without Women Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis-Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying William Faulkner
53. Brave New World Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop Evelyn Waugh
55. USA John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague Albert Camus assigned
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
60. Malone Dies Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies William Golding another one I read in Siberia
67. The Quiet American Graham Greene
68. On the Road Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum Gunter Grass last year
71. Things Fall Apart Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird Harper Lee Love this book too!
74. Catch-22 Joseph Heller assigned; a friend read my copy in Rome
75. Herzog Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy Paul Auster
88. The BFG Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table Primo Levi
90. Money Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories Salman Rushdie
95. L.A. Confidential James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights Philip Pullman (The Golden Compass, in the USA)
99. American Pastoral Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz W. G. Sebald

(assigned = assigned AND READ; there are quite a few on the list that were assigned and UNread...)
There are a few here I think I've read, but didn't mark because I don't remember. About 10% of those I didn't mark I actually have started, but gave up on, so I don't think they count.
Conclusions: I need to read some "modern classics." And I'm glad they are considering kiddie lit!

The Bookman's Promise, by John Dunning

(0743249925)

I think Dunning only writes when he runs out of money. Which is sort of cool. Anyway, this is his first Janeway story in over a decade.

The main reason I've read his stuff before is that it takes place in Denver, the Denver I grew up knowing. And this is set in 1987, so I should know my way around a bit. Unfortunately, most of the action in this book takes place in South Carolina and Baltimore. Oh, well...

The story follows Richard Burton, the explorer, and tries to explain what he was doing for part of the three months he was in the U.S. just before the Civil War. So I got history and mystery in the same book, always good.

The story was interesting, and most of the way through I wasn't really focussed on who the bad guy might be. When I did start paying attention to that part of the plot, I 'got it' right away.

Pretty realistic characters, lots of factoids about the Civil War, Burton's life, and book collecting. Theoretically, at least, a subject close to the heart of a librarian. Which reminds me, there is a librarian as part of the investigative team here. She's close enough to the middle of things that her house gets torched.

I'll continue to hold out hope that more Janeway books will appear.

Monkeewrench, by P.J. Tracy

(0399149783)

I picked this up because it sounded weird and spooky. The plot essentially is that a new computer game has come out about forensic investigation. Now people in Minneapolis are dying just like the victims in the game, one victim per day. And then it turns out that the designers of the game have no identifiable background older than 10 years ago. And one of them admits that this same scenario unfolded in college, with acquaintances suddenly turning up dead in a rather macabre fashion.

There's a hermaphrodite involved, too.

Weirder and weirder.

But ultimately, it's a police procedural with some creative characters and plotlines set (partially) in an area of the world I know from experience. Not the greatest book I've ever read, but it was fun. And I wasn't sure until the very end who the murderer was/is. Which is good.

I just wish these police detectives would stop falling for the women around them. It's tedious; if there's a woman involved, she's beautiful and someone is going to be all la-la over her. Puh-leaze. Or she's a caricature (e.g., the Big Momma black police sergeant) and no one would dare or even think of falling for her. This is why I like Elizabeth George so much; Barbara Havers is just an average- (or not quite) looking woman doing her job.

So overall, this isn't a horrible book, but I think I can skip adding the author to my List.

Swimming Across : A Memoir, by Andrew S. Grove

(0446679704)

The author was CEO of Intel in the early '90s and Time's Man of the Year in 1997. But I hadn't remembered hearing of him before picking up this book.

The man has lived through some of those famously interesting times. He was born in Hungary in 1936, a non-religious Jew at a bad time in history. Since I knew nothing about the history of Hungary, this book gave me a primer on the events of the middle of the 20th century in that country from World War I through the mid-50s under Communism.

Grove (who was Andris Grof in Hungary) escaped from Hungary after the Hungarian revolt against Russian Communism was put down with Russian tanks. He simply (well, not really so simply) walked across the border into Austria. And he's never gone back. He came to America and built a life for himself. Eventually his parents were able to immigrate as well.

But that part of his story is the end of his exciting tale. It's a life story worth reading. Very speedy, simple reading, lots of pictures of himself as a child and young adult, which is unusual. Well-paced. Don't think it will be a classic, but it is eye-opening.

Guardian of the Horizon, by Elizabeth Peters

(0066214718)

The latest, just out this month, in the Amelia Peabody series.

Where to start...if you haven't read this series this explanation will probably make no sense. I'll do my best. The Editor has "discovered" some lost papers that cover the years between about 1906 and just before WWI. These papers detail the Emersons return to The Lost Oasis ten years after their departure with Nefret. They are invited to return because of alleged illness in the royal family. Of course, that turns out to be a ruse; the usurper-king really needs Nefret back to bring stability to the kingdom. Which, of course, the Emersons are not going to be giving freely, since they back the true king, who was overthrown and is leading a slave revolt. There are many more Englishmen who have discovered the Oasis, and the end of their thousand-year-old seclusion is clearly present.

So, Ramses is 20, Nefret is 23, and the elder Emersons are in their mid-fifties (which means in the previous book, published last year, Ramses was 30+, Nefret was mid-thirties, and their parents are........holy cow! Almost 70!). Ramses is much less stolid in his parts of the narrative, as befits his age. But it is disconcerting to see him getting all hormonal about all the lovely women, not excluding Nefret of course.

I love this series. I love Elizabeth Peters; anything she writes. Except I didn't like this book. I turned against it from the start, for a couple of reasons: lots more swearing than I remember in other books (usually very Victorian in their used of "confounded" etc., the Emersons, all of 'em, swear up a storm here), and seemingly less explication, and more dialogue. The plot just seemed much looser than the norm. Maybe The Editor didn't have the usual depth and quality of notes with which to work...?

Hollow Chocolate Bunnies of the Apocolpyse, by Robert Rankin

(0575074019)

Great title, eh? For a general view of this book, picture Roger Rabbit meets Sam Spade meets Thursday Next. Very noir, but funny (in a noir-ish way), and convoluted.

Jack is on his way to the city to make his fortune. Too bad for him that the city is Toy City, populated by (yep) toys and Mother Goose characters (the Elite). He arrives just after Humpty Dumpty has been murdered--boiled alive in his own swimming pool--and soon other characters begin turning up dead. He and a stuffed bear named Eddie, the partner of Bill Winkie (disappeared, presumed dead) attempt to sort out all this. The police are no help: they are Smiling Policemen with a bent towards rubber hose use (since they are made of rubber after all).

Weird book. The mystery is really not the point, although if you are a noir fan, it will suffice. The joy is the creative characters and fantastic (in the old-fashioned sense) worldview Rankin has created. Having checked his list of books, I will say that they all seem to be as catchily-titled as this one. Might be worth a read. Good travel book.

Favorite books, Part I

Preliminarily, I must say that I am only up to 1999 in my lists and there are just TOO DAMN MANY...so I'm going to first write about the ones I remember from childhood, and why they are my favorites:

These Happy Golden Years--Laura Ingalls Wilder
I love all of these, but this is my favorite. I could read it once a month and still love it. My next favorite is The First Four Years , and then Little House on the Prairie or On the Banks of Plum Creek . I'm a complete nut about Laura Ingalls Wilder...used to think I was her, reincarnated. After all, our names are (almost) the same. The values and mores in these books are ones to attempt to live up to, in spite of the datedness of some of the imagery.

Narnia books--C.S. Lewis
Of course, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe ("the land of Spare Oom, the country of Ward Robe"), but I also really liked The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Eustace is such a putz and I loved the Dufflepuds/Monopods). I've read them all to my son, probably at too early an age, but by God he still remembers them! We giggle about them frequently; he just mentioned the Dufflepuds to me Monday, in fact. I just read somewhere recently that someone liked this series till they realized it was "Christian propaganda" (his words). Get over it--they are good stories whether or not they are allegorical (not propaganda--hmph).

Nancy Drew--Carolyn Keene
If you are an American female born between 1920 and about 1968, these were a must-read. I loved Nancy. My mother loved Nancy (we had a first edition of the first book of the series!). I thought I was George (my sister's nickname for me), but I knew I'd never tolerate Bess in my life...except now I know several Besses, and I tolerate them just fine. But, I still want a roadster.

Treasure in the Covered Wagon--Vera Graham
I read this book over and over and over. It's about the trip from Missouri to Oregon in the 1840s that so many settlers made. I just reread it last fall; it is horrendously dated, didactic and racist. My memories of it are about picking up buffalo chips for fire and, primarily, about a wagon being dropped off a cliff and the people having to pick up all their belongings and cram in with other families for the remaider of the trip.

Alice in Wonderland--Lewis Carroll
While in my early 20s, I reread this book annually, religiously. I love it. I don't know why; the sequel doesn't do anything for me much. Maybe it's because my mother wouldn't read it (she doesnt read books where animals talk...hmph), and it's a rebellion thing...? Anyway, I love Alice growing so big she's cramjammed in the house, and the baby turning into a pig and the rabbit scurrying about saying, "I'm late. Oh dear, I'm late."

A Wrinkle in Time--Madeleine L’Engle
I can't read this too many times either, although I'm not as obsessive about it as Alice . I just like this family of misfits and dysfunctionals that is such a perfect example of family love.

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory--Roald Dahl
Have you read this book recently?? Talk about a subversive book about how awful adults are! There are damn few decent people in this book. Which, of course, is why kids like it; they know that we're all creeps and hypocrites under our skins. Dahl got it just right.

The Hiding Place--Corrie ten Boom
I read this book when I was around age 11. It is probably the one book that influences my life almost daily. For those who haven't read it or heard the story, it is the true story of a family of Dutch watchmakers who hid and served as a courier point for Jews during the German occupation of World War II. Corrie and her sister Betsy and her 70ish-year-old father are "too old" to get involved in this. But they do it anyway, and are eventually arrested and sentenced to work camps. Corrie and Betsy are sent to Ravensbruck, where Betsy dies (their father dies elsewhere), but Corrie is released just before the end of the war. This was my introduction to the horror of World War !!, something that shatters me anew every time I examine that period of history. I have not read this in probably 20 years; I should get another copy (mine fell apart, crappy paperback that it was: yellow with a red swastika on it, with the gates of the camp behind the symbol, and lots of blurbs from reviewers--amazing that I can picture it so clearly).

What I remember about this book...Corrie asking her father about "sex sin" around 1900 (when she was about 12), the triangle signal in the window of the watch shop, Corrie being unable to take her pre-packed bag to prison for fear of giving away the door to the hiding place, her discussions of theology with the Nazi warden at her first prison, her "addiction" to toilet-paper playing cards, the bottomless vitamin bottle at Ravensbruck. being thankful for lice (yes, lice) in the barracks, dropping your jaw to keep your eardrums from breaking during bombardment...

Fifty-year-old spinsters and their father as heroes? How improbable. What an introduction to God's typical weird sense of rightness-in-wrongness.

Winnie-the-Pooh and Now We Are Six--A.A. Milne
I still have these books, crappy 34-year-old paperbacks that they are, because my sister annotated them for me, writing things like "This picture looks like Mommy when she was a girl. Tell her to find her picture and show it to you sometime." Yes, I can quote verbatim: "Is this [poem] about our Anne [another sister's baby]?" My sister was in college at the time, having taught me to read before going away [see below]. Guess what--she turned into a librarian when she grew up and finished her adventures in college and in Africa.

Other books I remember: the Beany Malone series (set in Denver, I had to read it. My mom made me). Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, and Mrs. Pickerell. The Hardy Boys (I read most of the series when I wasn't reading Nancy Drew). The Mouse and the Motorcycle. The Little House (now I'm really back in time!) by Virginia Burton. The book my sister used to teach me to read: Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

That's a good start. It's late, I'm tired.

The Serpents Trail

(0451211227) 2004

I have not read anything by this author before. I'm not sure I'll read any others. This one is set in Grand Junction, which is why I picked it up. The "detective" in the series is Maxie McCann, a 63-year-old Alaskan widow, who travels around with her dachshund much of North America in an RV. Clever concept, and there is plenty of info about RVing included.

The mystery surrounds the death of an old college friend of hers in Junction just after she arrives in town. Maxie has been named executor of her friend's estate, instead of the son of her friend. It's all mildly complicated, but not too hard to figure out.

This is one of those mysteries that is 'safe' to give to grandmas and kids, but also vaguely entertaining for plane trips and cool spring days. I wouldn't go out of my way to read another one, but I wouldn't exclude the possibility, either.

Box Nine, by Jack O'Connell

(0892964723) 1992

Sort of postmodern noir, a la Carol O'Connell (I actually kept wondering if this was the same author--it's not). Set in the fictional town of Quinsigamond somewhere in New England, this follows a set of twins who both get wrapped up in trying to figure out who has unloaded a crateful of a new drug called Lingo onto their city. Lingo makes one able to speak faster and remember everything you've said. It also makes you talk so fast your jaws are a blur and the words are a nasty insecty hum.

One of the twins, Lenore, is a cop who has not slept in 6 months. For her, working in the Narcotics Division means access to speed. So she's developed a use for it in her life. She is brought in to solve the Lingo issue. Her brother, Ike, is a postal worker who is about as milquetoast as a person can be, and he keeps finding icky (really, the only word) parcels being delivered to an unused mailbox.

Together they not only re-establish their need for one another but also open the question of which of them is actually the stronger.

There's virtually no one in this book who is decent and good, and certainly no one you'd want to hang around with for more than, say, uhm, 30 seconds. But, as in all noir, at the end, decency wins out and (some of) the bad guys are solidly defeated. For today.