An old meme.

Allcott, Louisa May–Little Women
Allende, Isabel–The House of Spirits
Angelou, Maya–I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Atwood, Margaret–Cat’s Eye
Austen, Jane–Emma
Bambara, Toni Cade–Salt Eaters
??Barnes, Djuna–Nightwood
de Beauvoir, Simone–The Second Sex
Blume, Judy–Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret
Burnett, Frances–The Secret Garden
Bronte, Charlotte–Jane Eyre
Bronte, Emily–Wuthering Heights
Buck, Pearl S.–The Good Earth
Byatt, A.S.–Possession
Cather, Willa–My Antonia
Chopin, Kate–The Awakening
Christie, Agatha–Murder on the Orient Express
Cisneros, Sandra–The House on Mango Street
Clinton, Hillary Rodham–Living History
??Cooper, Anna Julia–A Voice From the South
Danticat, Edwidge–Breath, Eyes, Memory
??Davis, Angela–Women, Culture, and Politics
??Desai, Anita–Clear Light of Day
Dickinson, Emily–Collected Poems
Duncan, Lois–I Know What You Did Last Summer  (for school, if you can imagine)
DuMaurier, Daphne–Rebecca
Eliot, Geroge–Middlemarch
??Emecheta, Buchi–Second Class Citizen
Erdrich, Louise–Tracks
Esquivel, Laura–Like Water for Chocolate
Flagg, Fannie–Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
Friedan, Betty–The Feminine Mystique
Frank, Anne–Diary of a Young Girl
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins–The Yellow Wallpaper
Gordimer, Nadine–July’s People
Grafton, Sue–S is for Silence
Hamilton, Edith–Mythology
Highsmith, Patricia–The Talented Mr. Ripley
hooks, bell–Bone Black
Hurston, Zora Neale–Dust Tracks on the Road
??Jacobs, Harriet–Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
??Jackson, Helen Hunt–Ramona
Jackson, Shirley–The Haunting of Hill House
Jong, Erica–Fear of Flying
Keene, Carolyn–The Nancy Drew Mysteries (any of them)
Kidd, Sue Monk–The Secret Life of Bees
Kincaid, Jamaica–Lucy
Kingsolver, Barbara–The Poisonwood Bible
Kingston, Maxine Hong–The Woman Warrior
??Larsen, Nella–Passing
L’Engle, Madeleine–A Wrinkle in Time
Le Guin, Ursula K.–The Left Hand of Darkness
Lee, Harper–To Kill a Mockingbird
Lessing, Doris–The Golden Notebook
??Lively, Penelope–Moon Tiger
??Lorde, Audre–The Cancer Journals
Martin, Ann M.–The Babysitters Club Series (any of them)
McCullers, Carson–The Member of the Wedding
McMillan, Terry–Disappearing Acts
Markandaya, Kamala–Nectar in a Sieve
??Marshall, Paule–Brown Girl, Brownstones
Mitchell, Margaret–Gone with the Wind
Montgomery, Lucy–Anne of Green Gables
??Morgan, Joan–When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost
Morrison, Toni–Song of Solomon
Murasaki, Lady Shikibu–The Tale of Genji
Munro, Alice–Lives of Girls and Women
Murdoch, Iris–Severed Head
Naylor, Gloria–Mama Day
Niffenegger, Audrey–The Time Traveller’s Wife
Oates, Joyce Carol–We Were the Mulvaneys
O’Connor, Flannery–A Good Man is Hard to Find
Piercy, Marge–Woman on the Edge of Time
Picoult, Jodi–My Sister’s Keeper
Plath, Sylvia–The Bell Jar
Porter, Katharine Anne–Ship of Fools
Proulx, E. Annie–The Shipping News
Rand, Ayn–The Fountainhead  (I’ve started it several times)
Ray, Rachel–365: No Repeats
Rhys, Jean–Wide Sargasso Sea
Robinson, Marilynne–Housekeeping
Rocha, Sharon–For Laci
Sebold, Alice–The Lovely Bones
Shelley, Mary–Frankenstein
Smith, Betty–A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Smith, Zadie–White Teeth
Spark, Muriel–The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Spyri, Johanna–Heidi
Strout, Elizabeth–Amy and Isabelle
Steel, Danielle–The House
Tan, Amy–The Joy Luck Club
Tannen, Deborah–You’re Wearing That?
??Ulrich, Laurel–A Midwife’s Tale
??Urquhart, Jane–Away
Walker, Alice–The Temple of My Familiar
Welty, Eudora–One Writer’s Beginnings
Wharton, Edith–Age of Innocence
Wilder, Laura Ingalls–Little House in the Big Woods
Wollstonecraft, Mary–A Vindication of the Rights of Women
Woolf, Virginia–A Room of One’s Own

So I’ve read a couple more books on the list since I did this three years ago, but more than anything else I’ve added to the list of books I WANT to read. Story of my life. **laugh**

NOTE TO SELF: ON KEEPING A JOURNAL AND OTHER DANGEROUS PURSUITS: Samara O’ Shea.

I read this book in much the same way I read books on writing the breakout novel: not as a how-to, but rather as an entertaining way to get me geared up and thinking about writing again. In that light, this book was perfect. Samara O’ Shea keeps her how-to tips short and then illustrates with examples from her own journal as well as the journals of great writers and other historical figures (ie: an entry written by John Wilkes Booth only days after assassinating Lincoln). It’s enjoyable if you keep a journal – I’ve kept mine for going on twelve years – but I would imagine that it’s equally enjoyable if you don’t, and equally enjoyable for the tidbits of journal entries throughout the book.

Of love and literature.

Am I alone here? A breakup can ruin a book for me. Or at least, a book can become forever associated with a breakup, which is not much better. Really, I don’t know which I will run out of to ruin first, books or men. (I’m working my way through them both pretty steadily, it would seem… I’ll certainly let you know when I’ve crossed over from Bookslut to actual slut.)

When I was eighteen, I broke up with Billy. (I know, I already told this story, bear with me.) That was the hardest breakup of my life so far. I was old enough to be blissfully expectant and passionate, but young enough to have almost zero real relationship experience behind me. When we broke up, it destroyed me. I cried day and night for two weeks. At eighteen, I thought my life was over – no kidding. Billy was the one to request that I read Atlas Shrugged. When we broke up, I didn’t touch it again for over a year. In fact, I had to hide it from myself so I wouldn’t have to look at it every day.

I’m going to skip through the next two very quickly. I was with Blake for almost two years in college. We were each crazier than the other for staying together, we made each other so miserable. Needless to say, I never really did get around to reading I Am Legend, but I will forever associate that book with that relationship.

Sidenote: next I dated Pablo. He didn’t speak English, so he didn’t ruin any literature for me. I did, however, have great difficulty listening to my RBD CDs and watching Rebelde for a while afterward.

Next to screw my reading was Bobby, and unfortunately this blog remembers that well. It was painful reading Anna Karenina as Bobby and I were breaking up in August. We had been together a few months short of a year at the time, but I was determined not to let it keep me from finishing the book. Thankfully, I only had about one hundred pages left when we broke up and I muddled through the end, not managing to enjoy it, in about a month… when it had taken a week for me to read the first eight hundred pages or so. But I stuck it out. And now I have the silliest idea that it was actually Kitty breaking up with Bobby in August, not so much me. (Booknerd = delusional?)

And now this: John and I broke up Tuesday night. For quite some time he had been giving me crap because I actually liked Great Expectations, and the more he talked about it the more it made me want to read it again. I haven’t read it since high school, and although I read it voluntarily I still can imagine that I didn’t have the greatest understanding of the book. At least, not compared to the experience reading it now would be. So I picked up the book on Tuesday. I began reading it shortly before going to John’s. I continued reading at John’s while I waited for him to get home from work – I beat him home – and then flaunted the fact that I was reading it when he arrived home. Then, at about midnight that night, I was packing up my toothbrush and razor and handing over the key I had to his condo. Now Great Expectations is breaking up with John.

And so it goes.

THE LAST OF CHERI: Colette.

I finally finished The Last of Cheri, and it’s about time. Originally, I started the book as part of my genius plan to read the complete works of Colette in order, in a row. This was not a good idea, only because I have literary ADD. So after reading The Complete Claudine (which includes Claudine at School, Claudine in Paris, Claudine Married and Claudine and Annie), The Vagabond, and Cheri, I just couldn’t make it through to the end of The Last of Cheri. Which is unfortunate, because when I picked it up again, I did enjoy it. Don’t expect a page-turner, don’t expect action-packed drama. Just appreciate the writing and the painfully inevitable evolution of the relationship between Cheri and Lea. (See? Several books like this in a row necessitates a change of literary scenery after a while. A short while.) Finishing this book did restore my faith in Colette, though… or I should say my faith in my abilities to appreciate Colette.

SPOILER AHEAD: For some reason, I can’t get past the very end of the book. Something about it disturbs me, not in the way it was written but in what occurs in the story. The end reminds me very much of Doris Lessing’s “To Room Nineteen,” and it’s very Colette to turn the situation around on the young lover after he abandoned his older mistress. I can’t decide, though, what to make of the fact that Lea gave her collection of portraits away at the end. Had she given up on her youth the same way Cheri did? In the end, were they on the same page after all? Or was that her way of ensuring that her youth and beauty would live on, even if she could no longer embody it? The woman in possession of Lea’s portraits is elderly; you can’t help but think Lea gave them to her knowing that they would find Cheri eventually. So then does the youthful Lea die with Cheri? Thinking about this disturbs me for some reason, but that’s how I know it was good. It’s continuing to bother me.

I maintain that Colette is an acquired taste, but so worth it.

Jump start with a meme.

Instructions:

1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read.

2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.

3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.

1. Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X

2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien

3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte 

4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling

5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X 

6 The Bible X

7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X +

8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X

9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman

10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X+

11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott X

12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy*  

13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X +

14 Complete Works of Shakespeare X+

15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier *

16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks

18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X+

19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger 

20 Middlemarch – George Eliot *

21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell*

22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald X+

23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens X*

24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy*

25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams

26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh*

27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky* 

28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck*

29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+ 

30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame 

31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy X+

32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens*

33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis X

34 Emma – Jane Austen X

35 Persuasion – Jane Austen*

36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X

37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini *

38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Berniere*

39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden 

40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne 

41 Animal Farm – George Orwell

42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown

43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving*

45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins*

46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery 

47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy *

48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood *

49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X 

50 Atonement – Ian McEwan *

51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel *

52 Dune – Frank Herbert 

53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons

54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X

55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth

56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon *

57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X++++

58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X +

59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X 

60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez *

61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck X +

62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X+

63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt 

64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold X

65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas*

66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac X

67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy*

68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X

69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie*

70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville*

71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens*

72 Dracula – Bram Stoker X+

73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett

74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson

75 Ulysses – James Joyce*

76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath X

77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome

78 Germinal – Emile Zola

79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray X+

80 Possession – AS Byatt X+

81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens*

82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell*

83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker X

84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro*

85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert*

86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry

87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X

88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom

89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton 

91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad X

92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery 

93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks 

94 Watership Down – Richard Adams 

95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole* 

96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute

97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas*

98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare X 

99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl

100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo*

The end of “Books I’m reading”.

I thought it was pretty cool when other people did it. When there were cute little pictures of the books people are currently reading sitting there in the sidebar. I thought that was cute and I wanted to do it, too, but it backfired.

I was not meant to have little pictures of what I’m currently reading in my sidebar. If it’s posted, it doesn’t get read. It’s that simple. I can be 300 pages into a book and if I post it, it doesn’t get finished. I can make a conscious and sincere effort to finish the books in my sidebar – nothing will get in my way! – and when I go to pick it up again for the first time since posting the picture in my sidebar, the book has mysteriously disappeared. I kid you not.

So I’m going to get ready to do away with that. I like the way it livens up the blog a little bit, though, so I’m considering replacing it with my recent book purchases, which I think is equally interesting.

Christmas meme.

 

This is stolen from the beautiful Books. Lists. Life. blog.

1. Wrapping paper or gift bags?
Wrapping paper. It’s way more fun to tear into a present than to lift it out of the bag… not that I complain about either.

2. Real tree or Artificial?
Real. We’ve had artificial, and it’s a pain in the ass to put together.

3. When do you put up the tree?
A couple of weeks into December, but we put it up early for my Christmas part this year.

4. When do you take the tree down?
New Year’s Day.

5. Do you like eggnog?
I’ve never tried it. It doesn’t sound too appealing.

6. Favourite gift received as a child?
The American Girl Dolls, of course.

7. Hardest person to buy for?
My mom. She says she’s the easiest because she likes EVERYTHING, but that’s why she doesn’t give me any sort of idea of what she would like.

8. Easiest person to buy for?
My brother. Piece of cake. Every time.

9. Do you have a nativity scene?
Yes, in the living room.

10. Mail or email Christmas cards?
Mail.

11. Worst Christmas gift you ever received?
Don’t even get me started on that. I wanted a puppy so badly one Christmas when I was about six, and it was the only thing I asked for. Christmas morning I wake up looking for my puppy and find a little stuffed animal. I was pissed.

12. Favourite Christmas Movie?
The Family Stone, Christmas Vacation.

13. When do you start shopping for Christmas?
This year it was late November.

14. Have you ever recycled a Christmas present?
Nope.

15. Favourite thing to eat at Christmas?
Candy from my stocking.

16. Lights on the tree?
Yep. White lights AND beads.

17. Favourite Xmas song?
That stupid Mariah Carey song. I love it. Or “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.”

18. Travel at Christmas or stay home?
Home.

19. Can you name all of Santa’s reindeer?
Rudolph, Blitzen, Donner, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dancer, Prancer… Blitzen… am I just making names up now?

20. Angel on the tree top or a star?
We have a teddy-bear angel.

21. Open the presents Christmas Eve or morning?
Morning! What the hell???

22. Most annoying thing about this time of the year?
I HATE wrapping presents. I love seeing them pile up under the tree, I love opening them, and love giving people presents with pretty paper, but I HATE wrapping them.

23. Favourite ornament theme or colour?
I like all of our shiny ornaments. Our tree is very pretty, with white lights and a lot of clear, gold or silver ornaments.

24. Favourite memory of Christmas?
Christmas parties at my aunt’s house… before our branch of the family was exiled.

25. What do you want for Christmas this year?
I wanted a subscription to The New Yorker, a pretty Anthropologie necklace, and a bunch of surprises.

BIRD BY BIRD/PEP TALKS, WARNINGS AND SCREEDS.

First I read Ann Lamott’s Bird by Bird. I love finding a good book about the writing life versus the craft. It’s inspiring and motivating, but it’s not the same old bullshit about Setting, Characters, Dialogue, Conflict, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah. I really kind of hate that. Anyone who’s read a damn book knows about setting and character and all. Not to say that they can all construct it effectively, but I doubt reading about it a million and one times helps anymore than reading effective story elements themselves.

But I digress.

Ann Lamott’s book is great, even if you’re not the slightest bit interested in writing yourself. It is laugh-out-loud funny. Hildie Block (Google her) recommended the book to me several years ago (wow, years?) and I should have read it immediately. But whatever, it’s doing me some good now.

 It was a tough act to follow, I admit, so the next book on writing I read, while enjoyable, paled slightly in comparison. George Singleton’s Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds: Indispensible Wisdom and Cautionary Advice for Writers was cute, funny, all that good stuff… Worth a read, I think, if you like these kinds of books. A quick read, anyway.

But here’s a question for you: I hear very frequently that you need to start with short stories. Don’t like short stories? Too f-ing bad, that’s how it works. But then more recently I have been hearing that there’s no real sense in starting with short stories if it’s not really your “thing.” If you’re dying to write a novel, there’s just as slim a chance of getting that in print as there is of getting a short story in print, so what the hell. Does anyone know any more about this than I do? (Ahem, Amy Shearn?)

Save money by reading!

This article inspired me to take a much-needed inventory of my bookshelves. Listed below are the books that immediately struck me upon quickly browsing to see which books I already own that I am super-anxious to get to… now that I remember that I have them.

Fiction

Nada: Carmen Laforet  
 On Chesil Beach: Ian McEwan
 Atonement: Ian McEwan
 Against the Day: Thomas Pynchon
 Gone With the Wind: Margaret Mitchell
 Hunger’s Brides: A Novel of the Baroque: Paul Anderson
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie: Muriel Spark
The Agony and the Ecstasy: Irving Stone
 Academy X: Andrew Trees
 The Beautiful and the Damned: F. Scott Fitzgerald
 Veronica: Mary Gaitskill
 Theft: Peter Carey
 Wonder Boys: Michael Chabon
 Rebecca: Daphne du Maurier

Nonfiction

The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath  
 The Art of Love: Ovid
 Virgin: the Untouched History: Hanne Blank
 Shop Talk: Philip Roth
 Between Women: Friendship, Desire and Marriage in Victorian England: Sharon Marcus
 Women Troubadors: Magda Bogin
 Misquoting Jesus: Bart D. Ehrman
 Literary Feuds: Anthony Arthur
 Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women: Elizabeth Wurtzel 

To Finish Reading

Small World: David Lodge
Pearl: Mary Gordon
Bleak House: Charles Dickens
The Madwoman in the Attic
The Last of Cheri: Colette
Mansfield Park: Jane Austen

To Re-read

 Absalom, Absalom!: William Faulkner
The Puttermesser Papers: Cynthia Ozick 
How to Make an American Quilt: Whitney Otto
This Side of Paradise: F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises: Ernest Hemingway
Inferno: Dante Alighieri
Catch 22: Joseph Heller 

Favorite author meme.

This was stolen from 1 more chapter… even though I have no clue how to answer it.

1. Do you have a favorite author? That is absolutely impossible. And usually, I can be a sport and pick an author I love off the top of my head just to play along, but this is really impossible. I’ll talk about two people: Colette, who I thought could potentially be my favorite author but I’m not liking so much now; and Shakespeare, who I avoided like the plague for so long and can’t help but love now.

2. Have you read everything he or she has written? Not by a long shot. They’re both so damn prolific – don’t you hate that? I mean, how am I supposed to be a die-hard fan when they went around writing every day of their freaking lives?! (It was a joke, Jesus – watch, now people are going to throw a fit.) The more Colette I read the less I liked it; everything was less-good than what I read before. Loved The Pure and the Impure, loved the Claudine books, not big on the Cheri books, which are some of the most popular. Shakespeare, on the other hand, I avoided until I took a class on his early works in college, and I couldn’t help but love everything we read.

3. Did you LIKE everything? I guess I already answered that about Colette. My favorite thing so far that Shakespeare has written was Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare meets Resevoir Dogs. I was also surprisingly fond of The Merchant of Venice.

4. How about a least favorite author? Stephen King, hands down. I’m not being a snob here, either, I swear I’ve tried time and time again to read his crap. But it’s CRAP.

5. An author you wanted to like, but didn’t? Not so much authors but books. I hated On the Road. Oh, here’s one: Walt Whitman. Doesn’t matter how much I read, I just don’t like him. It’s physically painful for me to read Leaves of Grass. Oh, another one! Elfriede Jelinek! What the hell is her problem? I mean, really… Jesus… that woman has problems or something. If you haven’t read her, you almost have to. I mean, you have to read her to believe it. I swear to God, she is what becomes of serial killers with literary leanings. Good Lord. Everyone go read her now and tell me what you think. Uggh.