The Idiot Learns To Read #1: The List

A few years ago, I was in Columbia Mall in the Borders bookstore, and like most bookstores, it’s all set up by genre and whatnot. You know, like all the sci-fi over here and the romances over there, and self help in the corner, and children’s books in the back. They had one wall where they had all the classics. By classics, I mean all those books you were supposed to read in high school, the books that were on summer reading lists, stuff you should have before you went to college. I really liked that wall. There were a few books that I suffered through, but then there were so many I had yet to read. I decided that I was going to work my way through that wall.

I never did. I didn’t even start with book one. Back then I was heavily into the romance genre, and I still am, but I couldn’t see myself putting down a light-hearted useless book to pick up some serious intellectual reading. Reading is supposed to be relaxing, a way to unwind and to escape to some fantasy land. Who wants to do school type reading?

Maybe it’s because I’m getting on in years (hahaha) but suddenly I have that same desire to go back and read all the books I should have read, and re-read the books I did but didn’t do proper justice. I did read a lot of Shakespeare, but I also did quite a bit of Cliff’s Notes just trying to cram in time for an exam. Some books I gave up on because they escaped me: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Anna Karenina by Tolstoy. Maybe now I’m of the right mindset to understand them.

I have comprised a list of 62 novels/books/collected works/poetry/whatever considered to be classic. I know that I might have left something important off the list, but I didn’t want to spend a year trying to compile the perfect list. If I’ve forgotten something, let me know and when I come back for part two, I’ll be sure to scoop it up. I figure I’m going to be having a lot of time on my hands very soon, and what better way to while away the hours than between the pages of a good book.

Although I’m probably wasting my breath, but if anybody wants to join me in this journey, let us do this together. We can read the same book and discuss what we love/hate about it. Even though I’m into movie watching and all that, I feel like our society is slowly degrading because nobody seems to read anymore. I do not mean the classics, necessarily, just anything. It is amazing to me how many people out there that don’t read at all. Anything, not even a comic book.

I am greatly disturbed by people who do not read and write well. How do you get on in life?

Anyway, here’s my list. Naturally, I will be blogging my life away, commenting on everything. They say the best way to become a good writer is to become a good reader. Let’s learn how to read together.

1984 by George Orwell
Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Animal Farm by George Orwell
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Antigone by Sophocles
Arabian Nights by Antony Galland
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Colour Purple by Alice Walker
Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Crucible by Arthur Miller
Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Dracula by Bram Stoker
Emma by Jane Austen
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo
Iliad by Homer
Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde
Indian in the Cupboard by Lynne Reid Banks
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
King Lear by William Shakespeare
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Lord of the Rings (the trilogy) by J.R.R. Tolkien
M. Butterfly by David Henry Hwang
Macbeth by William Shakespeare
Madame Bovary Gustave Flaubert
Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Mutiny on the Bounty by Charles Nordhoff and James Hall
My Antonia by Willa Cather
Night by Elie Wiesel
Odyssey by Homer
Oedipus Rex by Sophocles
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
Othello by William Shakespeare
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw
Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett
Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
Stranger by Albert Camus
Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
Tartuffe by Moliere
Tempest by William Shakespeare
Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Turn of the Screw by Henry James
Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte