Literary meme!

[rainsometimes]

I'm stealing this meme from zero_dances. It's got nothing at all to do with One Piece, for once!

"What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. Here's the twist: add (*) beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you read 'em for school in the first place."




Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell* - Original and intriguing
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment* Dostoevsky! For angsty teenagers and others! One of the most read novels of the last two centuries!
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude* - Coool; very much its own thing
Wuthering Heights - kinda meh. Not completely uninteresting but didn't match the hype
The Silmarillion* (for fellow Tolkien fanatics at least!)
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose (?) - see remark below
Don Quixote - I love Sancho Panza.
Moby Dick
Ulysses (??) - likewise, see below
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey* - Just a few months back, finally!
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities(*?) - Read it in the middle of an obsession with the French Revolution; don't know what I would think about it now
The Brothers Karamazov* - Like "Crime and Punishment" except even better! I liked Ivan the most!
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace* (slow going though, but I've never really read anything quite like it)
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife - but probably will!
The Iliad - Not yet!!
Emma - Didn't like this one that much, though it has its moments
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway* - though while Woolf's prose style is kinda cool (in my eyes) it makes for slow going; I'd warn for that
Great Expectations
American Gods* - Haven't re-read it yet though, nor bought the paperback. But I found it very absorbing the first time around
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (When I saw this book in the bookshop I was intrigued until I realised it was nonfiction - then for some reason I lost all interest.)
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (I wanted to read it until I heard it was about Dracula. Vampires tend to bore me)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault's Pendulum -More like, skipped around a lot through it
Middlemarch* - I liked it quite a bit, but it's long and slow and 19th century-ish. It probably helps if you've seen the BBC mini-series first, as I had
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula - Boooring! ;)
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys* -Enjoyed it a lot; have plans to buy the paperback
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath* - Though I found it hard to get into again the one time I did try re-reading it. Still, it affected me a lot the first time
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984 - I knew how darkly it ended and couldn't bring myself to finish it.:( Read cheerful stuff like The Gulag Archipelago instead
Angels & Demons
The Inferno* - But I would defintely recommend Purgatorio as well. Me like Dante's branch of poetry - I think I first read it in school but I'm not sure.
The Satanic Verses* - May well be my favourite Rushdie novel. I liked the character Saladin Chamcha!
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray (*?) - Not great stuff nor my favourite Wilde work but prettily written and kinda interesting. Short, too
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse* - Repeat remark on Woolf's prose style
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist - Didn't care for this one: far too melodramatic. Also why was Fagin actually hanged? Dickens can be so much better
Gulliver's Travels
Les Misérables* - If you're fine with 19th century melodrama and far-flung ambitions - and a lot of French political history - there's actually a lot that can be rewarding about this one. LOOOONG, though.
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay* -Recommend SOO much! I totally loved it! Awesome!!
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things* - I doubt I'll re-read it though: far too depressing for me.
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present - I may well go back to this one some day. It just didn't grab me for some reason.
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere* - Very imaginative but the ending was kinda weak in my eyes
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved* - Had a big impact on me way back when; don't know if I'd like it that much now, though
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves* - If you like reading about punctuation
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion* - My favourite Jane Austen book (well, I've only read 3)
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye - For English class
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid (I need to read this one day now that Ursula K. Le Guin has written a novel based on part of it)
Watership Down* -Anyone else think that the relationship between Bigwig and Hazel is kinda similar to Zoro and Luffy? (Although Hazel is reasonable and Luffy, not so much)
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit* - Starts out as old-fashioned ho-hum children's book, but gets to be a pretty good YA novel along the way, with real tension and character development and everything! Also, has a dragon!
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island - Read as a kid; didn't like much as there were no girls in it (or dragons!;)
David Copperfield* - I haven't really re-read it though.
The Three Musketeers - Began as a kid; the musketeers bored me and I never finished it. Or maybe I did and I just don't remember

I know I have read at least read good chunks of Ulysses and The Name of the Rose, but I can't recall if I've read them the whole way through or not. I know with Ulysses at least I skipped around a good deal, but I may have skipped back later.

Comments

[serrende.livejournal.com]

(Got your latest replies, btw! Thanks so much, again!)

Watershhip Down. <333333333333333

Amen to that!

American Gods (liked that one, also the sequel).

Sequel? I know Neil has written a short story with Shadow in it - do you mean that one (I forgot its name: something with "glade")? I've wanted to read it for a good while now but haven't been ready to buy a whole collection just for that one story. Granted, I do tend to like most of Gaiman's stuff, but I don't need to read everything he's done (and I think his short stories can be rather cold).

Wicked (good, if you are prepared that it will also be dark.)

Hmm...not sure if I'd be a good audience for that one. The Oz books were a part of my childhood but the movie wasn't - I only saw it a few years ago, in fact, and many of the changes annoyed me. Is it based more on book or movie version? (If movie version, I might not be too interested; if book version, I may not want to read a reversal of the book's values...;)

[tonko-ni.livejournal.com]

Anansi Boys is the sequel to American Gods. Well, I guess maybe it's not a sequel exactly, but it's the same universe, which is why I called it that.

Wicked... I'm not sure which it's based on, to be honest, I've read the books (long, long ago) and seen the movie (like, once) and it didn't really change my reaction to either. Admittedly I didn't have a strong one. If, say, they did a dark retelling of Narnia I might've had more of a reaction. But Wicked isn't a retelling. It's like... serious/realistic fanfic of the concept of the Wizard of Oz. The events from the book/movie happen mostly "offscreen."

The book has Galinda (before she called herself Glinda) and Elphaba (the not-yet Wicked Witch of West) at school together. Galinda is not a sweet perfect fairy and Elphaba... well, the book's touted as giving more background into her, but she's by no means good either, it's all extremely complex and grey and "bad shit happens" and "am I supposed to like her? I can't tell." It's not simple.

Actually, you know what, if you liked the original Oz books, you would probably enjoy the Wicked musical, which is much more positive overall. Like, Elphaba is 100% a good person who ends up framed for Bad Things. Galinda/Glinda is a stuck up little twit who eventually realizes how to be good. For an example of the feeling of the musical, here is a press reel clip of Popular (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKY0RejvuoQ), a number from the point in the musical after which Glinda has decided to be nice to Elphaba (she means well but is evidently still her shallow self). And here is the culmination of the first act Defying Gravity (hthttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=47zTfXOFeTQ), where Elphaba is finally sick of being framed and persecuted. (I love that number <333) Musical!Elphaba/Glinda is my Wicked OTP...

It's very, very different from the book, so much so that, because I first found out about Wicked from the musical, and THEN read the book, I was really shocked. It's like it went from sweet/childish (original Oz) to dark/complex (Wicked book) to family-friendly again (Wicked musical). The characters in the book and musical are not at all interchangeable.

[serrende.livejournal.com]

Actually, you know what, if you liked the original Oz books, you would probably enjoy the Wicked musical, which is much more positive overall. Like, Elphaba is 100% a good person who ends up framed for Bad Things. Galinda/Glinda is a stuck up little twit who eventually realizes how to be good.

Ah, okay. The musical seems to be a LOT less subtle than the book, from your description. I'd probably feel guilty about liking it more! ;) Nah, just kidding. But I don't know how much chance the musical has of getting over here, on stage OR television. The Oz books are popular enough in children's libraries but neither they nor the Wizard of Oz movie are as entrenched in popular culture as they seem to be in the States. (And maybe Canada?) I think mostly we know the Oz stuff less from actually watching/reading but from hearing and reading constant references to it in American sources. Just second-hand. (Like how I know Star Trek and many other things - all second hand.)

But is the Oz world at all interesting as a background in the Wicked novel, would you say? (I'd assume if so, it's a considerably darker version of it.) Or is the focus pretty much all on the characters?

[tonko-ni.livejournal.com]

If you looked hard enough you might be able to find a camera-recorded copy of one of the shows on Youtube, I actually watched it that way because the album alone left me confused (it's a musical, but tons of the plot/action is spoken, so not included in the album), but yeah, I know it can be hard to get stuff like that. I'm in Montreal and we get skipped a lot for touring musicals because of the French stuff.

In the book, Oz itself as a setting is very important. One of the plot issues is Oz politics, actually, accusations of Bad Things going on because all the Animals (talking creatures) are loosing their voices, there are people murdered, different sects and races of the population are represented and there are churches and stuff... part of the reason I found it so dark and sobering was all that stuff--it made Oz so much more realistic, and with that came all the bad stuff that happens as it does in our world. Racism, bashing, weird sexual stuff... The world of Oz feels... grimy in a way the real world does. There's mud and dirt and blood in it.

And the sequel, Son of a Witch, continues that. The main character is so... non-heroic, and he's not even an anti-hero, he's just... frankly, a normal, non-special slightly wussy guy with reactions that kind of disappoint the reader while making the reader feel vaguely guilty because you know that a normal person would do what he does... except he's the main character so you keep expecting him to be more than that. It was a weird feeling. But ultimately I enjoyed it, especially the very end.

All that said, though, I was able to read it and I still love the Wicked musical even now--it didn't reduce my enjoyment of the simpler and happier version of Oz, where Galinda grew up into Glinda, and was really good, and Elphaba had a tragic life overall but was ultimately redeemed and remembered by Glinda at least.

Though, I am an AU fan in my fandom readings, so maybe that's why I was able to wall them off from each other so much.