L&L: A Room with a View by E.M. Forster,

After how much I was surprised to like A Passage to India by Forster, I was bummed to find A Room with a View rather dull.

-None of the characters were particularly likable.

-Other than challenging some social norms, was anything happening in the book?

-Why were George and Lucy questioning Charlotte's intentions at the end of the book? Could the end at all justify the means? How are we, the reader, supposed to take that in terms of our evaluation of Charlotte, but also George and Lucy?

L&L: Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne

I just have to note that this is one of my favorite audiobooks. It is plot motivated and the characters are grand, and those elements together make it easy listening.

- I selfishly loved all the action in Nebraska because I've spent a lot of time on the Platte River. I was enchanted by the travel in India as well (I will be traveling there soon), because I was mentally comparing Verne's India with Wilkie Collins' India in The Moonstone. Both are strongly colonial and judgmental.

-The portrayals of America were entertaining. Justice of the peace? Hah!

- My biggest frustration with the book was Aouda. The woman who is given no agency, frequently no words, and a fierce Stockholm syndrome that becomes legitimate once Mr. Fogg decides to love her.

The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald

I listed to The Beautiful and Damned on audiobook quite a while ago. I really didn't love it, just the story of two people who use money to fix their problems and never learn their lesson, ever. I guess Fitzgerald did a pretty great job of making the characters consistent in moral character, and he was successful making you dislike them.

The reason I'm posting here at all is because there was part of a sentence in the book that I wrote down immediately after hearing it--and I just found it.

... that it is the manner of life seldom to strike but always to wear away. 

Sure, he's probably not the first person to express that sentiment. Yet I think he expressed it well in that very Fitzgerald way.

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 

Happy Anniversary Pride & Prejudice

Today marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. 

There is a read-a-thon at the Jane Austen Centre in Bath, as well as numerous other activities across the globe. [It's days like these where I miss college the most, knowing many of my English classes, and professors, would be celebrating in style.]

To celebrate this momentous occasion, I intend to read my Annotated Pride and Prejudice and make a post to this here blog. And I hope to rehash my undergrad lectures--women in literature, romance, british lit--and post something intelligent, not just a grouping of my favorite quotes. There is so much to say about this book: the woman who wrote it, the characters that evolved from it, and where it fits in education and literature.