Ok…well, now that I’m done licking my wounds about recent literary rejections, I can address Jade Park’s challenge. Come up with 50 favorite books. Her list, is here, by the way, in case you want to compare our at times uncanny similar tastes. (And, by the way, thanks for the sweet consoling to all my blogging buddies. It helped. I know…I’m a whiner, but bear with me.)
So here they are in no particular order, like Jade, just, as they came into my mind. Geez, Now that I look at her list, I am seeing more similarities than I had initially expected. By the way, I included poetry/plays if they stuck in my mind as a whole.
1. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoyevsky **favorite of all time**
2. Middlesex- Jeffrey Eugenides **favorite of all time**
3. 1984 –George Orwell
4. Brave New World—Aldous Huxley
5. Love In The Time of Cholera—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
6. The Bluest Eye—Toni Morrison
7. Freedom or Death—Nikos Katzanzakis
8. Fahrenheit 451- Ray Bradbury
9. Slaughterhouse 5–Kurt Vonnegut
10. Matilda—Roald Dahl
11. Island of the Blue Dolphins Scott O’Dell
12. Lord of the Flies—William Golding
13. The Great Gatsby—F. Scott Fitzgerald
14. A Wrinkle in Time—Madeline L’engle
15. Hopscotch—Julio Cortazar
16. A Personal Matter—Kenzaburo Oe
17. The Silent Cry—Kenzaburo Oe
18. Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch–
Henry Miller
19. Sexus—Henry Miller
20. The Stranger—Albert Camus
21. Native Son—Richard Wright
22. The Homeric Hymns—Homer
23. Jean Paul Sartre—The Wall
24. Anna Karenina—Leo Tolstoy
25. Howl—Allen Ginsberg
26. Three Trapped Tigers—G. Cabrera Infante
27. The Scarlet Letter—Nathaniel Hawthorne
28. Paradise Lost—John Milton
29. Death of a Salesman—Arthur Miller
30. The Fountainhead—Ayn Rand
31. The Idiot—Dostoyevsky
32. Notes From the Underground—Dostoyevsky
33. Down and Out in Paris and London—George Orwell
34. Chronicle of a Death Foretold—Gabriel Garcia Marquez
35. Texaco—Patrick Chamoiseau
36. The Ballad of the Sad Café—Carson McCullers
37. The House on Mango Street—Sandra Cisneros
38. White Teeth—Zadie Smith (I love her, and she’s nice in person when I was lucky enough to get her to sign my book.)
39. Nickel and Dimed—Barbara Ehrenreich
40. Push—Sapphire
41. The Catcher in the Rye—J.D. Salinger (why didn’t I think of this one sooner. I love this book)
42. The Grapes of Wrath—John Steinbeck
43. To Kill a Mockingbird—Harper E. Lee
44. Diary of a Young Girl—Anne Frank
45. Leaves of Grass—Walt Whitman
46. Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov
47. Mama Day—Gloria Naylor
48. The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter—Carson McCullers
49. On the Road—Jack Kerouac
50. The Metamorphosis—Kafka
4 responses so far ↓
jadepark // November 29, 2006 at 6:38 am |
ooh! yes! how could i have forgotten mama day?!
hey, i think it’s Jeffrey not Geoffrey, for Eugenides.
wildguppy // November 29, 2006 at 10:42 am |
ooh you’re right.
jadepark // November 30, 2006 at 10:45 pm |
i have been planning on reading Oe for ages now! i ahve “teach us to overcome our madness”–but you would you recommend I read A personal matter or silent cry before that one? (like many murakami fans also have a strong opinion on which order to read some of his books, and strong opinions on which book of his to read first).
wildguppy // December 1, 2006 at 1:07 am |
You have to read Oe, and I still have yet to read Murakami.
Hmm of the two, i would read A PERSONAL MATTER first–You will love it. I actually met Oe. He came to UCSB when i was there and the univerisity paid for whoever signed up to get to have dinner with him. He signed my book. I was too shy at the time to sit at his table, and it was before I had read his book. But he was very kind to us. We were so lucky because of John Nathan, his translator and friend brought him over. (Nathan was also Mishima’s before he died). I got to take Nathan’s class at UCSB in Japanese lit at the college of creative studies. I walked into this class, completely unaware of how great it would be.