my name is shelly...
and I am a book-o-holic.
I like books. I like to read them. Moreover, I like to own them. After Thursday's trip to the used book fair at Lenox (you should check it out), I came home with 12+ books. I would have gotten more, but I couldn't carry any more.
After alphabetically inserting my purchases into my modest library, it dawned on me... I have a lot of books I haven't read. So I counted them. Thirty. 30! I felt like a literary poser. So I hereby resolve to not buy any more books until I have read, well, ah, at least, let's see, five books. I will only buy one book for each five that I read until I've caught up.
So which one would you read next? Seriously, let me know. Consider this a book review request. Your help is greatly appreciated.
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
A Concise History of the Catholic Church by Thomas Bokenkotten
An Hour Before Daylight by Jimmy Carter
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Cider House Rules by John Irving
Crazy Cock by Henry Miller
Crossing the Threshold of Hope by Pope John Paul II
Dante's Inferno
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Enemy at the Gates by William Craig
Founding Brothers by Joseph J. Ellis
Franny & Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Jefferson Himself: The Personal Narrative of a Many Sided American
Life of Pi by Yann Martel
Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides
Profiles in Courage by John F. Kennedy
Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson
The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
The Commanders by Bob Woodward
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
The Evolution of Useful Things by Henry Petroski
The God File by Frank Turner Hollon
The Lovely Bones by Alice Sebold
The Lucifer Principle by Howard Bloom
The Oedipus Plays of Sophocles
The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Touching the Void by Joe Simpson
Watership down by Richard Adams
posted by shelly @ 10:27 AM
10 Comments:
brave new world, surley. the most intresting of those, and you get quite taken by it.
Inferno you should be able to read true quite fast if your used to reading poetry.
Me Talk Pretty One Day. definitely. GREAT book.
I think you're the only person in the world who actually has MORE unread books than I do. Life of Pi was very good... And if you read Dante's Inferno, I'll read it too. That'll check one of the books off my list.
The first solution is to give half away. Give them to a library. That takes care of the main problem. Then buy better books.
What better books do you recommend?
Brave New World - one of my all time favorites!!
Also loved Life of Pi and Touching the Void, although now the photo on my REI Visa card makes me cringe.
Cider House Rules... I love John Irving.
Here's a suggestion for your next car trip - books on tape!!! Esp. Me Talk Pretty One Day. David Sedaris does the reading and he is hillarious.
Alright, the post isn't that old -- so I'll continue - books to read -
Brave New World is classic, Huxley rules. Me Talk Pretty One Day is awesome, but I would read his other books right after -- I got in the Sedaris mood for two weeks and read three or four of his works. The audiobooks are great too, because he does the narration. Touching the Void is incredible -- it will make you feel worthless for not being as hardcore as him. I'm trying to read Life of Pi and East of Eden, and was told to read those, so those would be on my list. The rest of your list looks really interesting to I'll bookmark it for a winter reading list for me.
I have a fondness for older material and not a lot of reverence for the new stuff. But since you're asking for opinions, here is mine: read the classics (true and newer) first. I don't necessarily think that they're better than contemporary works; however, you never know when contemporary writers will reference - either obviously or obliquely - a classic work, and you want to get it when you read it. It would be like watching The Simpsons without even passing knowledge of the films of Stanley Kubrick. The Simpsons will still be funny, but it could be a fuller experience for you.
If you're feeling brave, take a stab at _Portrait of a Lady_, but that one is really just my personal opinion - it's not terribly significant, literary-wise, and Henry James can be a real chore to read, but I love his work.
Oh yeah, and I'm in agreement with the other Sara(h) about _East of Eden_, though I enjoyed the book more, possibly because my mental pictures of the characters ended up being quite far away from the actors in the movie, particularly James Dean.
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