Time 100 Wrapup
Cue the trumpets and confetti, I finished another booklist! I've been at the booklist project since 2000. It's only taken me 13 years to read these 200 books! Or really seven years to finish the first list and five more years to finish the second. But who's counting?
When I did my Radcliffe wrapup post, I chose 10 books that I'd remove from the list and my top 10 favorite books. I think I might need more than 10 favorites, but we'll see when we get there. First...
My Ten Least Favorites
1. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński
2. Herzog by Saul Bellow
3. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul
4. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
5. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
6. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
7. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
8. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
9. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
I didn't really have a lot of runner ups for this. By and large, the Time 100 list is great. Of the list above, the only ones I really feel confident saying I hate or strongly dislike are the first four. The next two are ones that I actually would like to re-read, since it's been so long since I first read them and I feel like maybe they should get a second chance. And the last four I don't feel strongly about, just didn't enjoy as much as everything else on the list. Not bad, right?
My Ten Favorites
1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
4. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
5. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
8. White Noise by Don DeLillo
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison
10. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Oh my god, this was so much harder to narrow down. Some things that were on my shortlist: Lolita, The Sun Also Rises, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Clockwork Orange, Ragtime, Atonement, White Teeth, Possession, Play It As It Lays, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Infinite Jest, The Blind Assassin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, On the Road, Brideshead Revisited, and Money. For starters. I love all those books!
10 I'd Like to Re-Read
1. To the Lighthouse
2. Mrs Dalloway
3. Appointment in Samarra
4. Death Comes for the Archbishop
5. Brideshead Revisited
6. Snow Crash
7. Go Tell It on the Mountain
8. Catch-22
9. A Passage to India
10. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
The first eight are books that I know I loved, but haven't read in years. The last two are ones that I have disliked for so long that I don't even remember why, so I want to at least try and see if I still dislike them. (I also considered Wide Sargasso Sea in this category, but, naah.)
So what's next? I may yet tackle the MLA list that started it all (I have 26 books to go on that one, which at this rate should take me two and a half years) but for 2014 I'm going to take a break in favor of doing some re-reads and clearing off my bookshelves a bit. I don't usually blog re-reads, but I will make exceptions for coming back to a book years or decades later. (I haven't read Catch-22 since high school, for example.) More on those plans as they solidify.
MORE CONFETTI FOR ME!
When I did my Radcliffe wrapup post, I chose 10 books that I'd remove from the list and my top 10 favorite books. I think I might need more than 10 favorites, but we'll see when we get there. First...
My Ten Least Favorites
1. The Painted Bird by Jerzy Kosiński
2. Herzog by Saul Bellow
3. A House for Mr. Biswas by V.S. Naipul
4. Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
5. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster
6. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
7. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
8. Rabbit, Run by John Updike
9. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
10. The Man Who Loved Children by Christina Stead
I didn't really have a lot of runner ups for this. By and large, the Time 100 list is great. Of the list above, the only ones I really feel confident saying I hate or strongly dislike are the first four. The next two are ones that I actually would like to re-read, since it's been so long since I first read them and I feel like maybe they should get a second chance. And the last four I don't feel strongly about, just didn't enjoy as much as everything else on the list. Not bad, right?
My Ten Favorites
1. Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
2. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
3. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
4. The Berlin Stories by Christopher Isherwood
5. Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
6. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
7. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
8. White Noise by Don DeLillo
9. Beloved by Toni Morrison
10. Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Oh my god, this was so much harder to narrow down. Some things that were on my shortlist: Lolita, The Sun Also Rises, Their Eyes Were Watching God, A Clockwork Orange, Ragtime, Atonement, White Teeth, Possession, Play It As It Lays, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Infinite Jest, The Blind Assassin, Go Tell It on the Mountain, On the Road, Brideshead Revisited, and Money. For starters. I love all those books!
10 I'd Like to Re-Read
1. To the Lighthouse
2. Mrs Dalloway
3. Appointment in Samarra
4. Death Comes for the Archbishop
5. Brideshead Revisited
6. Snow Crash
7. Go Tell It on the Mountain
8. Catch-22
9. A Passage to India
10. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter
The first eight are books that I know I loved, but haven't read in years. The last two are ones that I have disliked for so long that I don't even remember why, so I want to at least try and see if I still dislike them. (I also considered Wide Sargasso Sea in this category, but, naah.)
So what's next? I may yet tackle the MLA list that started it all (I have 26 books to go on that one, which at this rate should take me two and a half years) but for 2014 I'm going to take a break in favor of doing some re-reads and clearing off my bookshelves a bit. I don't usually blog re-reads, but I will make exceptions for coming back to a book years or decades later. (I haven't read Catch-22 since high school, for example.) More on those plans as they solidify.
MORE CONFETTI FOR ME!
Labels: reading lists, time 100, wrapup
posted by mo pie at 11:06 AM
2 Comments:
Wow, that is a great list! Everything on there is either top 10 or "kill me now" material.
Ha! Yeah, it's really good. I would love to read an updated version. Of course, then I would be compelled to finish the updated version of the list...
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