List, with my comments, is below. I've read thirteen -- how many have you read?
- The Lottery (and Other Stories), Shirley Jackson
- To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf
- The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton
- White Teeth, Zadie Smith - I loved this book - perhaps one of my favorites on this list!
- The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende - sitting on my to-be-read (TBR) shelf, and has been for half a decade
- Slouching Towards Bethlehem, Joan Didion
- Excellent Women, Barbara Pym
- The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath - not exactly warm and fuzzy, but a great read
- Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys
- The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri - I of course felt compelled to read this when I moved to India, but I didn't like it as much as I apparently should have
- Beloved, Toni Morrison
- Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
- Like Life, Lorrie Moore
- Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen - I would lose my romance card if I hadn't read this
- Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë - this book is great, even if it's a bit strange to fall in love with someone whose insane wife is locked in the attic
- The Delta of Venus, Anais Nin
- A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley
- A Good Man Is Hard To Find (and Other Stories), Flannery O'Connor - I've read a couple of stories out of this collection, but I won't count this as a full read
- The Shipping News, E. Annie Proulx
- You Can't Keep a Good Woman Down, Alice Walker
- Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
- To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee - amazingly, we actually read this in high school, although I believe we also watched the movie; this was one step up from THE SCARLET LETTER, which we watched rather than read
- Fear of Flying, Erica Jong
- Earthly Paradise, Colette
- Angela's Ashes, Frank McCourt
- Property, Valerie Martin
- Middlemarch, George Eliot - TBR
- Annie John, Jamaica Kincaid
- The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir - TBR, sitting on the main TBR shelf; maybe I'll get to it this year
- Runaway, Alice Munro
- The Heart is A Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers
- The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston
- Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë - I've read this, but don't remember liking it as much as I thought I would
- You Must Remember This, Joyce Carol Oates
- Little Women, Louisa May Alcott - I loved this book; I also loved LITTLE MEN, which took place after Jo married and started taking in orphaned boys, but it's a totally different story
- Bad Behavior, Mary Gaitskill
- The Liars' Club, Mary Karr
- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou
- A Tree Grows In Brooklyn, Betty Smith - is it bad that I've never read this?
- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie - I LOVED this mystery, even if the title was originally something that had to be sanitized several times for a more politically-correct audience
- Bastard out of Carolina, Dorothy Allison
- The Secret History, Donna Tartt
- The Little Disturbances of Man, Grace Paley
- The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker
- The Group, Mary McCarthy
- Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
- The Golden Notebook, Doris Lessing
- The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank - I've read it and seen her house in Holland
- Frankenstein, Mary Shelley - yes
- Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag
- In the Time of the Butterflies, Julia Alvarez
- The Good Earth, Pearl S. Buck - I adored this book, and wrote some college entrance essays on it -- even though China was worlds away from my small-town life in Iowa, I've always been fascinated by the lure of the land and tales of generational conflict
- Fun Home, Alison Bechdel
- Three Junes, Julia Glass
- A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft
- Sophie's Choice, William Styron
- Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann
- Love in a Cold Climate, Nancy Mitford
- Gone with the Wind, Margaret Mitchell - yes
- The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
- The Red Tent, Anita Diamant
- The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera - TBR
- The Face of War, Martha Gellhorn
- My Antonia, Willa Cather - one of the great books I read as a teenager; it also lead to a fierce argument with my best friend's mother over the pronunciation of "Antonia"
- Love In The Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez - I liked this book, although I'm surprised that it was picked; ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE is perhaps my favorite book of all time
- The Harsh Voice, Rebecca West
- Spending, Mary Gordon
- The Lover, Marguerite Duras
- The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy
- Tell Me a Riddle, Tillie Olsen
- Nightwood, Djuna Barnes
- Three Lives, Gertrude Stein
- Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons
- I Capture the Castle, Dodie Smith - I haven't read this, but I saw the movie and liked it
- Possession, A.S. Byatt
What about you? What do you think is missing? Are there books on the list that shouldn't be?
2 comments:
i have a lot of reading to do apparently. there's a lot on this list i haven't read!
- i LOVED and then there were none. we had to read it for school in jr high i think and i finished it in 2 sittings.
- i HATED 100 years of solitude. i cant even explain how deeply i dislike this book.
@ricecakeconfessional: yes, AND THEN THERE WERE ONE was perhaps my favorite Agatha Christie book, and I read almost all of them (well, heavier on the Poirot books; I wasn't quite as big on Miss Marple, although I did like the few books she wrote with Tommy and Tuppence Beresford - did you read those?)
I'm surprised you didn't like ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF SOLITUDE -- although I suppose the story wasn't exactly uplifting :)
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