Classic Fiction

I have FINALLY started on my third book.  I decided to choose a book from the Classic Fiction section of 501 Must-Read Books-- The Scarlet Letter.  While I won't go into details about this selection, I must say I am enjoying rereading this staple of high school literature classes.  Once again, for your convenience I will list the books from this category:

1.  The Epic of Gilgamesh, Anon
2.  The Thousand and One Nights, Anon
3.  Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
4.  Old Goriot, Honore de Balzac
5.  Bathek: an Arabian Tale, William Beckford
6.  Lady Audley's Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon
7.  Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
8.  Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
9.  The Pilgrim's Progress, John Bunyan
10.  The Canterbury Tales, Georffrey Chaucer
11.  The Collected Stories, Anton Chekhov
12.  The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
13.  Fanny Hill or Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, John Cleland
14.  The Moonstone: a Romance, Wilkie Collins
15.  The Hound of the Baskervilles, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
16.  Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
17.  Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
18.  The Christmas Books, Charles Dickens
19.  Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens
20.  Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoyevsky
21.  Middlemarch: A Study in Provincial Life, George Eliot
22.  Tom Jones, Henry Fielding
23.  The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
24.  Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
25.  Howards End, E.M. Forster
26.  North and South, Elizabeth Gaskell
27.  The Sorrows of Young Werther, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
28.  The Vicar of Wakefield, Oliver Goldsmith
29.  The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene
30.  King Solomon's Mines, H. Rider Haggard
31.  Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy
32.  The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
33.  Moby-Dick, or The Whale, Herman Melville
34.  The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James
35.  The Iliad, Homer
36.  Les Miserables (The Wretched), Victor Hugo
37.  Three Men in a Boat, Jerome K. Jerome
38.  Kim, Rudyard Kipling
39.  Bliss and Other Stories, Katherine Mansfield
40.  Utopia, Sir Thomas More
41.  Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, Edgar Alan Poe
42. In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust
43.  A Sicilian Romance, Anne Radcliffe
44.  Clarissa, Samuel Richardson
45.  Waverley, Sir Walter Scott
46.  Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley
47.  The Red and the Black, Stendhal
48.  The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson
49.  Dracula, Bram Stoker
50.  Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
51.  Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray
52.  War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
53.  Barchester Towers, Anthony Trollope
54.  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
55.  Candide, or Optimism, Voltair
56.  The Castle of Otranto, Horace Walpole
57.  The Hose of Mirth, Edith Wharton
58.  The Picture of Dorain Gray, Oscar Wilde
59.  To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
60.  La Beter Humaine, Emile Zola

Looking over this list, it both excites me and fills me with dread.  So many books on here I've told myself I'll read "someday"-- Frankenstein, Gulliver's Travels, Madam Bovary, Fanny Hill, The Thousand and One Nights....  Others are like old friends (I once took a literature course in college, because I knew The Great Gatsby would be on the syllabus).  Others I am not looking foward to at all.  I attempted to read Heart of Darkness once...I think I got to page three.  And I'm sure this is considered sacrilege, but I have to confess that I've read Wuthering Heights before, and I didn't really care for it.  But this little project is an adventure for me, and I'll see what happens.  I may enjoy myself!

July's People

Ugghhh!  Forgive me for such a short post.  March is my birthday month, and as such it has been one busy month for me.  Live music, frisbee in the park, wagon rides, goat petting, cupcake eating, coffee drinking and general lazing have taken up good chunks of my time.  And then there's the triumph of my son FINALLY starting to pee in the potty.  Sure, I've had a lot of fun, but it's taken me forever to get around to writing this blog entry.  Please forgive me if it's short and sweet; it is not a reflection upon the quality of the novel.

July's People is actually a fascinating look at South Africa during apartheid, and the relationship between a white couple and their African servant.  The Smales consider themselves to be very liberal, but when racial warfare breaks out and they have to flee to July's village, a spotlight is shined on the role race plays in their relationship.  It is definately an interesting read.

Hopefully, I will be selecting another novel shortly, but who knows-- garden-planting season is upon us.  And last I checked The Victory Garden book was not on the list of 501 Must-Read Books.

Modern Fiction

I have begun reading (or rereading, as the case may be) July's People by Nadine Gordimer.  This is from the "Modern Fiction" section.  I don't want to go into details until I have finished the book, but I will list the books in this section so you can get a feel for what it entails.

1.  Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
2.  Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands, Jorge Amando
3.  Le Grand Meaulnes, Alain-Fournier
4.  Take a Girl Like You, Kingsley Amis
5.  Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson
6.  Surfacing, Margaret Atwood
7.  The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster
8.  Tales of Odessa, Isaak Babel
9.  Giovanni's Room, James Baldwin
10.  The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks
11.  The Regenerational Trilogy, Pat Barker
12.  Herzog, Saul Bellow
13.  Ficciones, Jorge Luis Borges
14.  Nadja, Andre Breton
15.  The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
16.  The Naked Lunch, William Burroughs
17.  Possession, A. S. Byatt
18.  If On a Winter's Night a Traveller, Italo Calvino
19.  The Outsider, Albert Camus
20.  Auto da Fe, Elias Canetti
21.  Oscar and Lucinda, Peter Carey
22.  The Kingdom of this World, Alejo Carpentier
23.  The Bloody Chamber, Angela Carter
24.  What We Talk about When We Talk About Love, Raymond Carver
25.  The Horse's Mouth, Joyce Carey
26.  Journey to the End of Night, Louis-Ferdinand Celine
27.  Soldiers of Salamis, Javier Cercas
28.  The Stories of John Cheever, John Cheever
29.  Disgrace, J. M. Coetzee
30.  Cheri, Colette
31.  Victory, Joseph Conrad
32.  A House and It's Head, Ivy Compton-Burnett
33.  Fifth Business, William Robertson Davies
34.  Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Louis de Bernieres
35.  Underworld, Don Delillo
36.  Seven Gothic Tales, Isak Dinesen
37.  Berlin Alexanderplatz, Alfred Doblin
38.  Once Were Warriors, Alan Duff
39.  Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier
40.  The Lover, Marguerite Duras
41.  The Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence George Durrell
42.  The Name of Rose, Umberto Eco
43.  The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
44.  The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
45.  The Wars, Timothy Findley
46.  The Good Soldier, Ford Maddox Ford
47.  Wildlife, Richard Ford
48.  A Passage to India, E. M. Forester
49.  The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
50.  Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks
51.  The Blue Flower, Penelope Fitzgerald
52.  From the Fifteenth District, Mavis Gallant
53.  One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
54.  Our Lady of the Flowers, Jean Genet
55.  Lord of the Flies, William Golding
56.  July's People, Nadine Gordimer
57.  FerdyDurke, Witold Gombrowicz
58.  The Tin Drum, Guenter Grass
59.  Hunger, Knut Hamsun
60.  The Blind Owl, Sadegh Hedayat
61.  The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
62.  The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
63.  Lost Horizon, James Hilton
64.  A High Wind in Jamaica, Richard Hughes
65.  The World According to Garp, John Irving
66.  Berlin Stories, Christopher Isherwood
67.  The Remains of the Day, Kazui Ishiguro
68.  Ulysses, James Joyce
69.  The File on H, Ismail Kadare
70.  The Trial, Franz Kafka
71.  It, Stephen King
72.  The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera
73.  The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
74.  The Diviners, Margaret Laurence
75.  Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence
76.  The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
77.  The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
78.  Changing Places, David Lodge
79.  The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas, J. N. Machado de Assis
80.  The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz
81.  The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer
82.  The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann
83.  Embers, Sandor Marai
84.  Life of Pi, Yahn Martel
85.  Cakes and Ale, W. Somerset Maugham
86.  The Group, Mary McCarthy
87.  The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson Mccullers
88.  Enduring Love, Ian McEwan
89.  The Sea of Fertility, Yukio Mishima
90.  A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry
91.  Cold Heaven, Brian Moore
92.  Beloved, Toni Morrison
93.  The Progress of Love, Alice Munro
94.  The Sea, the Sea Iris Murdoch
95.  Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov
96.  A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul
97.  The Third Policeman, Flann O'Brian
98.  A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O'Connor
99.  The English Patient, Michael Ondaatje
100.  Where the Jackals Howl, Amos Oz
101.  The Messiah of Stockhold, Cynthia Ozick
102.  Gormenghast, Mervyn Peake
103.  Mr. Weston's Good Wine, T. F. Powys
104.  The Nephew, James Purdy
105.  Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice
106.  Barney's Version, Mordecai Richler
107.  Hadrian the Seventh, Frederick Rolfe
108.  The Radetzky March, Joseph Roth
109.  The Human Stain, Philip Roth
110.  The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
111.  Pedro Paramo, Juan Rulfo
112.  Bonjour Tristesse, Francoise Sagan
113.  Short Stories, Saki
114.  Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger
115.  Staying On, Paul Scott
116.  Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
117.  Last Exit to Brooklyn, Husbert Selby, Jr.
118.  Unless, Carol Shields
119.  The Magician of Lublin, Isaac Bashevis Singer
120.  The Engineer of Human Souls, Josepf Skvorecky
121.  The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark
122.  The Man Who Loved Children, Christina Stead
123.  The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck
124.  Sophie's Choice, William Styron
125.  Perfume, Patrick Suskind
126.  The Confessions of Zeno, Italo Svevo
127.  Declares Pereira, Antonio Tabucchi
128.  The White Hotel, D. M. Thomas
129.  The Master Colm Toibin
130.  Felicia's Journey, William Trevor
131.  The Palm-Wine Drinkard, Amos Tutuola
132.  The Accidental Tourist, Anne Tyler
133.  Couples, John Updike
134.  The Time of the Hero, Mario Vargas Llosa
135.  In Praise of Older Women, Stephen Vizinczey
136.  Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
137.  Voss, Patrick White
138.  Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar


Yikes!  That's quite a list.  I thought I was fairly well read, but I can see that I have clearly missed some very important authors.  How is it possible that (to the best of my recollection) I have never read Steinbeck, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, and a host of others?  And just the title of the section is intimidating--  "Modern Fiction."  It feels like something you would write a thesis on--  "Defining Modern Fiction."  On the less intimidating fron there are some familiar faces here.  I had to smile when I saw Things Fall Apart on the list; everytime I see that title, I hear it in my head as pronounced by a certain Nigerian professor I had.  Never fails to produce a smile.  I wonder if a few years will deepend my understanding of novels such as A Hundred Years of Solitude, Lolita, or Beloved, all of which I have not read since college or before.  I guess I'd better start reading.  I have a big job ahead of me.

Charlotte's Web

I actually finished the first of my 501 books, Charlotte's Web, awhile ago but am just now taking the time to write about it.  It was every bit as charming as I remember it.  The part that really stood out for me was young Fern and her love of the animals.  I had to smile at the part where she tucks young Wilbur into her doll carriage next to her baby doll.  As a young child I had two black cats, and I enjoyed treating these poor, unfortunate creatures as babies.  As a matter of fact, my doll stroller had some severe scratches inside from where I had tried to swaddle our male cat, Sam, and give him a ride.  Apparently cats are less cooperative than piglets.  I also enjoyed sewing clothes out of paper for my little female cat, Phoebe.  Sadly, my mother could find no photos of these, although I know they existed.  Phoebe was much more cooperative about being dressed up and photographed than Sam was about being wrapped up and pushed in a stroller.  When I was eleven, my parents gave me a Rottweiler-mix puppy as a belated birthday present.  I named him Dreamer, for his very active sleep life-- he ran, barked, grumbled, etc. when he slept.  Just like Wilbur, Dreamer had been raised on a bottle.  Unlike Wilbur, he grew to prefer orange juice to milk.  And just like Fern did with Wilbur, I took him everywhere.  I once heard said that a dog lover will always have a dog, but they will only have one dog who is THE dog.  Dreamer was THE dog for me, and I'm grateful for all 14 years I shared with him.

Me (at age 11) with Dreamer

(Please ignore the hair.  My mother was under the illusion that she could cut hair...And that bangs would be a good look for me)

Me (at 25) with Dreamer

(You can see by the bandana that I enjoyed dressing him up too)