Friday, January 07, 2005


So Dave and I stopped at a bookstore in Chilliwack on our way to Harrison Hot Springs. They had a lot of free things to pick up by the door, and one of them was How to be well-read: Fifty books you must be acquainted with to make the grade by Siri Agrell. Here they are for your benefit in no particular order.

Bold means I've read it, italics means I want to read it, underlined means I own it but haven't gotten around to it yet.


  1. The Tin Drum - Günter Grass, Germany


  2. Krapp's Last Tape - Samuel Beckett, Ireland


  3. The Stranger - Albert Camus, France


  4. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad, England


  5. Inferno - Dante Alighieri, Italy
  6. Actually, I want to read the whole thing.

  7. Bleak House - Charles Dickens, England


  8. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Russia


  9. The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner, United States


  10. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Columbia
  11. I've read "1000 Years of Solitude"

  12. The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway, United States


  13. Dubliners - James Joyce, Ireland


  14. Metamorphosis - Franz Kafka, Bohemia


  15. The Time and the Place - Naguib Mahfouz, Egypt


  16. Moby-Dick - Hermal Melville, United States


  17. Beloved - Toni Morrison, United States


  18. 1984 - George Orwell, England


  19. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie, India/Britain


  20. King Lear - William Shakespeare, England
  21. As an English major, perhaps I shouldn't come out of the closet here, but I HATESES Shakespeare. >:( I managed to go through an entire English degree and only have to read Romeo and Juliet (three times...once in high school, twice for classes) and MacBeth (high school)

  22. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy, Russia


  23. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain, United States


  24. Leaves of Grass - Walt Whitman, United States


  25. To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf, England


  26. The Red and the Black - Stendhal, France


  27. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov, United States
  28. God, I wish I hadn't. What a horrible, horrible book. *shudder*

  29. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald, United States


  30. The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger, United States


  31. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller, United States


  32. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood, Canada
  33. It's so good. I love it. And not just because it's Canadian, or feminist, or science fiction-esque.

  34. On the Road - Jack Kerouac, United States


  35. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath, United States


  36. The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck, United States
  37. I've read a bit of Steinbeck, and I have a book of his about King Arthur, but never read this one.

  38. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee, United States


  39. Heartbreak House - George Bernard Shaw, Ireland


  40. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde, Ireland
  41. Wicked good book.

  42. A Clockword Orange - Anthony Burgess, England


  43. The Glass Bead Game - Hermann Hesse, Switzerland


  44. The Awakening - Kate Chopin, United States


  45. The Color Purple - Alice Walker, United States


  46. One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest - Ken Kesey, United States


  47. Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller, United States
  48. Tis supposed to be filthy. I'm interested. :)

  49. Naked Lunch - William S. Burroughs, United States


  50. Howl - Allen Ginsberg, United States


  51. The Waste Land - T.S. Eliot, England


  52. Gravity's Raindow - Thomas Pynchon, United States


  53. Slaughterhouse Five or the Children's Crusade - Kurt Vonnegut, United States


  54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen, England
  55. I've never had any urge to read Jane Austen. I probably should.

  56. Lord of the Flies - William Golding, England


  57. Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, Spain


  58. Collected Poems - Robert Frost, United States
  59. Of course, I've read some of his stuff, but I really should read the rest. Is it a bad thing that sometimes I get Robert Frost and Robert Burns' poems mixed up? *blush*

  60. Barney's Version - Mordecai Richler, Canada

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