Women's History Month Reading List

A friend sent me the link to this reading list for Women's History Month. I've never even considered reading to fit the theme of this month (although Black History Month was something I always thought should be influencing my reading), so it's great someone clued me in! Does it count that I'm reading Little Women? That doesn't seem too far fetched of a WHM pick.

This list has 30 books to read, either to encourage you to quit life and read one a day, or in case, like me, you've read a couple. I've read four, to be exact, and I doubt I read the full Year of Magical Thinking. On this list, I'm most interested in Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters. She is the author of Fingersmith, another sexy little neo-Victorian book focused on the ladies. I've wanted to read more of her stuff since college. My next interest is Eleanor Catton's New Zealand mystery, The Luminaries. It's almost 900 pages and the author is young and smart and awesome, so I'm sold.

Added them both to my Goodreads... for next WHM.

Academic Endeavors in Literature

I recently came across a lot of papers I'd saved from high school and college classes, and I took note of a few of the books I read. College is probably less worth noting, since it's so specific to class interests, but I do find the high school list interesting. I feel like I had such a different experience than some of the people I went to high school with, not to mention people in other areas. I mean, I didn't even read Price & Prejudice? I did my best guessing on how to properly identify the works, italicizing and putting in quotations, but I admit I don't know that they're correct. Also, this definitely isn't a complete list. Like, I really think I read Great Expectations in high school, and there are a whole library of books missing because I didn't find info on my YA class and others from college and grad school.

High School English
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
-A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
-Canterbury Tales by Chaucer
-Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
-A Separate Peace by John Knowles
-"A Raisin in the Sun" by Lorraine Hansberry
-Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
-Lord of The Flies by William Golding
-My Antonia by Willa Cather
-The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
-"Othello," "Macbeth," "Henry V" "A Midsummer Night's Dream," "Taming of the Shrew," "Hamlet," "Romeo & Juliet"
-Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
-"A Visit of Charity" by Eudora Welty
- "A woman on a roof" by Doris Lessing
- "The Five Fourty Eight" by John Cheever
- The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
- "Birches" by Robert Frost
- "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

College Women and Literature
-"Oroonoko" by Aphra Behn
-Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
-Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
-A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
-Beloved by Toni Morrison
-Fingersmith by Sarah Waters
-"A Room of One’s Own" Virginia Woolf

College The British Novel in the 19th Century
-Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen
-Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
-Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
-The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
-Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
-Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell
-Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
-The Rebel of the Family by Eliza Lynn Linton

 College Kinship and Class in 19th Century Britain
-The Dead Secret by Wilkie Collins
-Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
-Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
-Sybil by Benjamin Disraeli.
-Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
-Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell

 

My 2014 Reading Recap

Here's a look at all the books I encountered in 2014. It feels pretty good! It was my first year really embracing audiobooks, and it shows--I only read a small handful of the books pictured.

Top picks of the year
1. Ready Player One (audio)
2. The Goldfinch (hardcover)
3. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo trilogy (audio)
4. Mansfield Park (e-book)
5. Beautiful Ruins (paperback)

Most disappointing books
1. Havisham (audio)
2. Death Comes to Pemberly (audio)
3. Anne of Green Gables (audio)
4. To Rise Again At A Decent Hour (e-book)

Best new-to-me author
Chuck Palahniuk (audio)
 
Best know-nothing pick
Out Stealing Horses (paperback)

Guiltiest Pleasure
All The Cat Who... books (audio)

2015 Read Harder Challenge

Trolling the interwebs this morning, I came across Book Riot's 2015 Read Harder Challenge.

What a delight! I have set some of my own big reading goals for my 28th year of life--reading more hefty classics and reading e-books--but I like this a lot. Part of the reason I recently started volunteering for my local library's home delivery program is because I get to encounter other readers who have different interests than me. My patron, in particular, likes WWII and non-fiction. So not my jam. But, I really like the diversity this challenge encourages. And it breaks down to about two tasks per month, fairly doable. Perhaps I can make it happen!

Here's a recap of the breakdown
(You should really check it out on the website, though.)

1. written by someone when they were under the age of 25
2. written by someone when they were over the age of 65
3. short story collection
4. indie press publication
5. LGBTQ view
6. written by a person whose gender is different from your own
7. that takes place in Asia
8. with an African author
9. written by/about someone from an indigenous culture
10. in the microhistory genre
11. in the YA genre
12. in the sci-fi genre
    The Handmaid's Tale - Jan 2015
13. in the romance genre
14. that won the National Book Award, Man Booker Prize or Pulitzer Prize in the last decade
15. that is a retells a classic story
16. on audiobook
17. collection of poetry
18. recommended by a friend
19. originally published in another language
20. in the graphic novel genre
21. a guilty pleasure
22. a book published before 1850
23. book published this year
24. self-improvement book

Oh, and if you decide to play along, make sure to use #ReadHarder on social media!

Book For Every State

I just came across this link from Brooklyn Magazine, called "Literary United States: A Map of the Best Book for Every State." What an idea! I kind of like the thought of reading your way through the USA, particularly when you're stuck in a Midwestern winter like the one heading my way in the far-too-near future.

I've read 9 of the 53 books on the list. Looks like I've got some work to do this winter.

10 Overlooked Novels

The Guardian posted an article about Overlooked Novels. I've never even heard of nine of them. But one, #9, is actually something I spent a lot of time on in college. 

I took a course on utopia from a literature professor with a large background in, and professional and focus on, Chinese culture. So, while studying portrayals of utopia (and dystopia, which was just as fun) we naturally combined both his interests through the 18th century epically long Chinese tale, The Dream of the Red Chamber also called The Story of the Stone.

The book is generally in five parts when translated to English, and while we were acquainted with the beginning of the story, we focused on the second book in the series, "The Crab-Flower Club."

This story inspired our final group project in the class, creating our own crab-flower club, and writing poetry, decorating pages with pastel pencilings of flowers, drinking tea, and other experiential recreations of the book and utopia, creating both our own characters and channeling those in the book. I honestly LOVED this project and the story itself, so I ended up a little hooked on the books and asked my parents for the whole series that year for Christmas or my birthday or something. 

(I didn't get them. Hello, buy a freshman a five-book series as she's embarking on a four-year English education that will cost hundreds in novels that she'll have to read each semester? Terrible trap that my parents avoided.)

But that's neither here nor there, because there's this list of ten obscure books, see, and I know and really like one of them. This is me, feeling like a smart, worldly nerd and loving it. 

Most Challenged Books of 2013

Last week, as part of National Library Week, the ALA released the 2013 list of the 10 most challenged books.

In order of most challenged...


#1 Captain Underpants series (published 1997-present)
#2 Bluest Eye (1970)
#3 The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007)
#4 Fifty Shades of Grey (2011)
#5 The Hunger Games (2008)
#6 A Bad Boy Can Be Good for a Girl (2006)
#7 Looking for Alaska (2005)
#8 The Perks of Being a Wallflower (1999)
#9 Bless Me Ultima (1972)
#10 Bone comic book series (1991-2004)

See other years' top-10 lists or read a little more about this year's list.

If you didn't get a chance to fully appreciate National Library Week by visiting a local library last week, take an opportunity sometime in the future to check out one or more of these books as a sign of support for your library's decision to carry them. We can support the freedom to read every day, and every week, not just BBW and NLW!

Penguin 100 Classics to Read Before You Die / Penguin 10 Essentials

I found a list online called "Penguin's 100 Classic Books You Must Read Before You Die." I found it online in lots of places and in lots of blogs, but not on Penguin's site. It seems old, so maybe that's why. But I thought the list was worth repeating, like so many lit lovers, because it's an interesting assortment. I'm really glad to see Wilkie Collins on here, that's for sure. Plus, I get all stoked when I can highlight books I've read off of major lists--like the 27 I've already tackled below. {Sorry for all the weird highlighting, there are two colors and yet I only selected one...} The ones in blue type are on my definitely-to-read list, meaning at the end of my life I'll have at least tried to tackle 50%--the only books I care about, anyhow. 

1. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey  

2. Diary of a Madman and Other Stories - Nikolai Gogol  

3. Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys 

4. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

5. Notes From Underground - Fyodor Dostoyevsky 

6. Story of the Eye - Georges Bataille 

7. Spy In House Of Love - Anais Nin 

8. Lady Chatterly's Lover - D.H.Lawrence 

9. Venus in Furs - Leopold von Sacher-Masoch 

10. The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer 

11. The Karamazov Brothers - Fyodor Dostoevsky 

12. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad 

13. Diamonds Are Forever - Ian Fleming 

14. The Master and Margarita - Mikhail Bulgakov 

15. The Secret Agent - Joseph Conrad16. A Room With a View - E. M. Forster 

17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte 

18. Don Juan - Lord George Gordon Byron 

19. Love in a Cold Climate- Nancy Mitford 

20. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof - Tennessee Williams 

21. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens 

22. Middlemarch - George Eliot 

23. She: A History of Adventure - H. Rider Haggard 

24. The Fight - by Norman Mailer 

25. No Easy Walk to Freedom - Nelson Mandela 

26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck 

27. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton 

28. Notre-Dame of Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame) - Victor Hugo 

29. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy 

30. The Old Curiosity Shop - Charles Dickens 

31. Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson 

32. Bram Stoker's Dracula - Bram Stoker33. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley 

34. The Castle of Otranto - Horace Walpole 

35. The Turn of the Screw - Henry James 

36. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray 

37. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov 

38. Baby doll - Tennessee Williams 

39. Breakfast at Tiffany's - Truman Capote 

40. Emma - Jane Austen 

41. On the Road - Jack Kerouac 

42. The Odyssey - Homer 

43. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck 

44. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome 

45. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll 

46. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald 

47. Vile Bodies - Evelyn Waugh 

48. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde 

49. The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald 

50. Against Nature - Joris-Karl Huysmans 

51. The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Malcolm X 

52. The Outsider - Albert Camus 

53. Animal Farm - George Orwell 

54. The Communist Manifesto - Karl Marx 

55. Les Misérables - Victor Hugo 

56. The Time Machine - H. G. Wells 

57. The Man in the High Castle - Philip K. Dick 

58. The Invisible Man - H.G. Wells 

59. The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham 

60. We - Yevgeny Zamyatin 

61. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess 

62. Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga - Hunter S. Thompson 

63. A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens 

64. Another Country - James Baldwin 

65. In Cold Blood - Truman Capote 

66. Junky: The Definitive Text of Junk - William S. Burroughs 

67. The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins 

68. Confessions of an English Opium Eater - Thomas De Quincey 

69. Subterraneans - Jack Kerouac 

70. Monsieur Monde Vanishes - Georges Simenon 

71. Nineteen Eighty-four - George Orwell 

72. The Monkey Wrench Gang - Edward Abbey 

73. The Prince - Niccolo Machiavelli 

74. Bound for Glory - Arthur Miller 

75. Death of a Salesman - Georges Simenon 

76. Maigret and the Ghost - Georges Simenon 

77. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins 

78. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler 

79. A Study in Scarlet - Arthur Conan, Sir Doyle 

80. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan 

81. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert 

82. Therese Raquin - Ãmile Zola 

83. Les Liaisons dangereuses - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos 

84. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne 

85. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy 

86. I, Claudius : From the Autobiography of Tiberius Claudius, Born 10 B.C., Murdered and Deified A.D. 54 - Robert Graves 

87. Hangover Square - Patrick Hamilton 

88. The Beggar's Opera - John Gay 

89. The Twelve Caesars - Suetonius 

90. Guys and Dolls - Hal Leonard Corporation 

91. Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson 

92. The Iliad of Homer - Homer 

93. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas94. From Russia with Love - Ian Fleming 

95. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy 

96. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons 

97. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith 

98. Pickwick Papers - Charles Dickens 

99. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh100. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

Interestingly, while searching for the official origin of this list, I came across Penguin's 10 Essential Classics. Like, if you only read 10 classics, read these. I've tackled 70% of that list. Of note: Only two of these ten are on the 100 list. Hmmp. And there's no Dickens or Mark Twain. Hmmm....

Penguin’s 10 Essential Classics:

1. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck

2. Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte

3. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

4. The Odyssey – Homer

5. Hamlet – William Shakespeare

6. Moby Dick – Herman Melville

7. Metamorphosis – Franz Kafka

8. Oedipus Rex – Sophocles

9. Walden – Henry David Thoreau

10. Inferno – Dante 

Kristina's Book List: aka The Impossible to Compile, and More Impossible to Finish...

In Shakespeare: Texts and Contexts during the spring of 2007, my new friendship with one not-so-plain Jane--a college freshman of extraordinary English talents--proffered this book list. It includes 20 books, ranked 1 to 10, that the very well-read literary geek has given her stamp of approval. I've kept it with me, tacked on cork boards, stuck inside closet doors, and taped to folders. But now it's time to share this with the world.

1. anything by David Sedaris

2. The Eyre Affair by Jasper Fforde

3. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami

4. On Beauty by Zadie Smith

5. The Sex Lives of Cannibals by J. Maarten Troost

6. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy

7. Atonement and Saturday by Ian McEwan

8. Indecision by Benjamin Kunkel

9. The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

10. Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

11. Prayer for Owen Meany by John Irving

12. Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer

13. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

14. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon

15. The Corrections by Johnathan Lethem

16. Drop City by TC Boyle

17. You Shall Know or Velocity by Dave Eggers

18. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

19. The Hours by Michael Cunningham

10. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Reading List: The Summer of Dangerous Reading

"The Summer of Dangerous Reading"
A reading list from More magazine, July/August 2012

1 | Live for Love

[Have an Affair]
Motherland by Amy Sohn

[Follow Your Heart]
The Right-Hand Shore by Christopher Tilghman
Before the Plan by Luisita Lopez Torregrosa

[Get Out of Your Rut]
The Forever Marriage by Ann Bauer
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

2 | Take Center Stage

[Rub Shoulders with an Icon]
Jack 1939 by Francine Mathews
Marilyn by Lois Banner
Dreaming in French by Alice Kaplan

3 | Rock the Home Front

[Fix Your Family]
The Red House by Mark Haddon
The World Without You by Joshua Henkin

[Rewrite the Past]
Elsewhere, California by Dana Johnson
The Secret Life of Objects by Dawn Raffel
Lizz Free or Die by Lizz Winstead

4 | Do a 180 on Your Life

[Switch Careers]

Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

Yes, Chef by Marcus Samuelsson

[Indulge in Some Villainy]

I, Iago by Nicole Galland

[Flirt with Disaster]

The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker

Inside by Alix Ohlin

The Pleasures of Men by Kate Williams

[Find Your Inner Beast]

The Lion is In by Delia Ephron