(Mostly) Annotated Books of Pretension

Well, that whole thing clearly didn't work out, did it? The first of the year hit, and with it came mega-lots of overtime. I have been storing up all of my brilliance so as to share it with the Internets some day, but until that day arrives, I felt compelled to partake in a meme I picked up from Evil Bender. I would link to the original, but you can click through if you really want to, and I am too lazy. Speaking of having one's English degree(s) revoked, failure to properly cite might be due cause... :-)

Italics: I have read
Strikethrough: Started, never finished
Normal: Never even tried

* Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
* Anna Karenina (seemed like a good idea at the time)
* Crime and Punishment (a labor of sheer stubbornness)
* Catch-22 (I was reading a friend's copy over at his house, set it down, and then never saw him again. Not by design or anything; it just kind of... happened.)
* One Hundred Years of Solitude
* Wuthering Heights
* The Silmarillion (It's no There and Back Again: A Hobbit's Holiday for readability...)
* Life of Pi : a novel
* The Name of the Rose
* Don Quixote (In Spanish - beat that!!)
* Moby Dick (too... much... whale)
* Ulysses
* Madame Bovary (I always associate this title with hidden lady-parts)
* The Odyssey
* Pride and Prejudice
* Jane Eyre (I know I read both this and Wuthering Heights when I was younger, but now I can't for the life of me keep them straight. I think Wuthering is the one with the crazy wife, right?)
* The Tale of Two Cities
* The Brothers Karamazov (see note on Anna Karenina)
* Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (never heard of it, but it sounds awesome...)
* War and Peace (see note on all Russian novels I have ever read)
* Vanity Fair (Anyone else just adore Thackeray?)
* The Time Traveler’s Wife (Is that anything like The Time Machine? Mmm... delicious, plump, lazy Eloi...)
* The Iliad
* Emma
* The Blind Assassin
* The Kite Runner
* Mrs. Dalloway
* Great Expectations (Best... Dickens... Evar)
* American Gods (did I mention I love Gaiman? srsly.)
* A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (pretty funny when it's not being all self-indulgent... which is heartbreakingly often)
* Atlas Shrugged (still can't think of my attempt to read this monstrosity without getting visuals of that terrible, terrible scene written by the Ayn Rand fanboy... you know the one. Ew.)
* Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
* Memoirs of a Geisha
* Middlesex
* Quicksilver
* Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West (Only if reading through the first chapter in Barnes and Noble counts as an attempt to read the book...)
* The Canterbury tales (Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote The droghte of March hath perced to to roote...)
* The Historian : a novel
* A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (How can anyone NOT read this?)
* Love in the Time of Cholera (see note on Catch-22)
* Brave New world (Ford is in his flivver and all's right with the world!)
* The Fountainhead (ugh, TWO by her? I SO wish I could rinse my brain out.)
* Foucault’s Pendulum (want to read)
* Middlemarch (Did you know that George was really a woman?!)
* Frankenstein (the monster is so much more articulate in the book than he has been in any movie... why is that? Maybe because 10-page monologues don't translate well to the silver screen, I guess, but it's still a shame. Hulk smash.)
* The Count of Monte Cristo (want to read)
* Dracula (I kept hoping for the good part, and then it was over. Ripoff.)
* A Clockwork Orange (I read the British version with the very moral final chapter still intact. What up now?)
* Anansi Boys (want to steal from EB's shelf read)
* The Once and Future King (should have, didn't. ah, well)
* The Grapes of Wrath
* The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
* 1984
* Angels & Demons (sweet Moses, no. why? Seriously, why?)
* The Inferno
* The Satanic Verses (I would probably put out a death sentence on him too... because I WISH I WROTE THIS WELL!! little religious/geopolitical humor there for you)
* Sense and Sensibility
* The Picture of Dorian Gray (Spoiler: the picture is HIM!! but only sort of)
* Mansfield Park (sadly, no)
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
* To the Lighthouse (I am ashamed.)
* Tess of the D’Urbervilles
* Oliver Twist (typical, depressing, quirky Dickens. Gotta love him)
* Gulliver’s Travels
* Les Misérables (I don't seem to do well with Hugo... unless, of course, it's Hugo Gernsback)
* The Corrections
* The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
* The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
* Dune (I want to kiss and marry this book. seriously.)
* The Prince
* The Sound and the Fury (this reads like a tale told by an idiot)
* Angela’s Ashes : a memoir (want to)
* The God of Small Things
* A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present (yes, I know I am a freakin' pinko commie leftist hippie. And yes, I'm ok with that.)
* Cryptonomicon (I thought this only existed in scifi movies?)
* Neverwhere (want to)
* A Confederacy of Dunces
* A Short History of Nearly Everything
* Dubliners
* The Unbearable Lightness of Being
* Beloved
* Slaughterhouse-five (See note on Catch-22)
* The Scarlet Letter
* Eats, Shoots & Leaves (Yes, it's pop linguistics. Yes, it's prescriptionistic to the extreme. But it's also sort of funny.)
* The Mists of Avalon
* Oryx and Crake : a novel
* Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
* Cloud Atlas
* The Confusion
* Lolita
* Persuasion
* Northanger Abbey (nope - on the list, eventually)
* The Catcher in the Rye (insert angst here)
* On the Road (didn't understand or appreciate it much, unfortunately... I was too young)
* The Hunchback of Notre Dame (more Hugo... I really do mean to read this stuff)
* Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything (sounds fun but also too self-aware for my taste)
* Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values (want to)
* The Aeneid
* Watership Down (bunnies!)
* Gravity’s Rainbow
* The Hobbit (now THAT is high-quality fantasy that doesn't put me to sleep.)
* In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
* White Teeth
* Treasure Island (of course - I was homeschooled, duh)
* David Copperfield (second-best Dickens evar)
* The Three Musketeers (Surprise, a Hugo I finished!!)