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!

Radcliffe Wrapup

So why did I read Finnegans Wake? Lots of answers to this, really. For bragging rights. For street cred as an English teacher. To finish one huge chunk of my reading list project, which I started years ago. Because it was a challenge, and I love a challenge. So I could speak intelligently about Joyce without dissembling. Because it is a work of genius (and ego, and penis, but also genius). Because it was fun. Because it was there?

Why did I read all the books on the Radcliffe list? Some of the same reasons. Before I started my reading project, I had never read any Hemingway, Faulkner, Woolfe, Cather, Vonnegut, or James, among others. Keep in mind, this is after I graduated from college and was halfway through graduate school. Keep in mind, I read constantly and always have, and consider myself a literate person. Keep in mind that my goal has always been to teach English. You can see that those gaps in my exposure to literature were not small ones.

Here is where it all started in the year 2000. Holy shit, have I really spent seven years on this project so far? Insane. (Well, it's not like I wouldn't have been reading anyway.) Really, it's been fantastic. Although some of the books on this list gave me physical pain (Atlas Shrugged, anyone?) there are so many amazing books and authors on here that I never would have discovered otherwise. Here are some lists of the list for you.

Ten Books I'd Kick Off the List
This is purely based on my own personal taste, not on what I think "should" be on the list. Here are 10 that I simply didn't enjoy.
1. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
2. Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
3. Look Homeward, Angel by Thomas Wolfe
4. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
5. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad
6. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
7. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
8. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
9. The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
10. A Passage to India by E.M. Forster

Runners up included (as much as I love James and Wharton) both The Bostonians and Ethan Frome, as well as Rabbit, Run, Heart of Darkness, The Wind in the Willows, and The Naked and the Dead. A lot of my issues with these books is that I couldn't get past the misogyny (like Women in Love) or that I don't think they have aged well (like The Jungle). Also, I apparently don't like books about India, as A Passage to India, Kim, and both Rushdie books were on my shortlist. I also don't like allegories much, since I also shortlisted The Old Man and the Sea and The Lord of the Flies. Nice to know these things about myself.

My Personal Top Ten
What are the ten best books on this list? The ten best books in literature. Crap, this is harder than picking the ten worst. I want to include Finnegans Wake just because it is such a genius book, but it's the opposite of accessible, willfully obtuse, and I think that's a strike against it. We'll call it number eleven.

1. Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
2. All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren
3. Beloved by Toni Morrison
4. Lolita by Vladmir Nabokov
5. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
6. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
7. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
8. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
9. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh
10. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier

Runners up were books I've loved for a really long time (White Noise, A Clockwork Orange, Catch-22) some classics that I'm sure you all know and love that I'm just going to take as read because otherwise this list would be impossible (The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird) and a couple of great American novels (Go Tell It on the Mountain, the Grapes of Wrath). Honorable mentions also go to The Maltese Falcon, A Separate Peace, In Cold Blood, The Wings of the Dove, To the Lighthouse, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Also, it killed me to cut Franny and Zooey, which I love more than Catcher in the Rye, and which you should all read.

Not on the Radcliffe list, but would have made this even harder? The Remains of the Day and, of course, Pale Fire.

So there you go. Feel free to take a gander at the Radcliffe list and let me know what you've read, what you loved, what you hated, and whether you agree with me or not!