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!
About Me
- Amber
- Illinois, United States
- I have always loved books. My mother has a photo of me as a small child, sitting on the floor surrounded by stacks of books, "reading" to my kitten. I'm pretty sure my love of books can be blamed on her; after all, she bought me most of the books in those stacks. I was startled to discover after having my son that I had gone months without reading a book. The previous record for time without reading a book could most likely have been measured in hours-- certainly not days, weeks, or months. I immediately rushed to the library to rectify this situation, and spent every napping moment frantically reading the biography of my favorite guitarist while my infant son napped. The book was unsatisfactory (I predict a return to rehab for the guitarist), but my book addiction is back in top form. Thus, despite having a husband, two-year old, two dogs, and a full-time job, I have decided to read all 501 books in my "501 Must-Read Books." I have enjoyed flipping through this in the past, reminiscing fondly about some of my favorites. Now I plan on actually buckling down, reading ALL 501, and sharing my experience.