And next on deck...

2004-05-07T07:08:00.000-05:00

So much literature, so little time!

The master list.

2004-05-07T05:04:00.001-05:00

Every book I've ever read - or at least remember reading. Most childhood reads (I was a huge Nancy Drew fan!) omitted. Works that have been commented on in this forum are permalinked.

Literature

Jane Austen
Northanger Abbey
Persuasion
Pride and Prejudice

Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451

Emily Brontë
Wuthering Heights

Albert Camus
The Stranger

Kate Chopin
The Awakening
Michael Cunningham
The Hours
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Great Gatsby
E.M. Forster
Howards End
Maurice
Joseph Heller
Catch-22
Ernest Hemingway
A Farewell to Arms
Kazuo Ishiguro
The Remains of the Day
Henry James
The Portrait of a Lady
Maxine Hong Kingston
The Woman Warrior
John Knowles
A Separate Peace
Harper Lee
To Kill a Mockingbird
George Orwell
Animal Farm
Annie Proulx
The Shipping News
J.D. Salinger
The Catcher in the Rye
John Steinbeck
Of Mice and Men
J.R.R. Tolkien
The Hobbit
Edith Wharton
The Age of Innocence
The House of Mirth
Jeanette Winterson
The Passion
Virginia Woolf
Mrs. Dalloway
To the Lighthouse
The Waves
The Diary of Virginia Woolf Vol. II & III
The Letters of Virginia Woolf Vol. I & III

"Light Reads"

Stephen Chbosky
The Perks of Being a Wallflower

Laura Esquivel
Like Water for Chocolate
Helen Fielding
Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason
Steve Martin
Shopgirl
J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix
Antoine de St. Exupery
The Little Prince

Short Stories

Octavia Butler
"Bloodchild"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman
"The Yellow Wallpaper"
Edgar Allan Poe
"The Telltale Heart"
"The Masque of the Red Death"
"The Fall of the House of Usher"
"The Raven"

Poetry

Pablo Neruda
Various
Minnie Bruce Pratt
The Sound of One Fork
Yours in Struggle
We Say We Love Each Other
Rebellion: Essays 1980-1991
Crime Against Nature
S/he
Walking Back Up Depot St.

Drama

Aristophanes
Lysistrada

Eve Ensler
The Vagina Monologues
Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House
Ben Jonson
Bartholomew Fair
Volpone
Thomas Kyd
The Spanish Tragedy
William Shakespeare
Hamlet
Macbeth
Much Ado About Nothing
Pericles
Taming of the Shrew
Romeo and Juliet
Sam Sheppard
Buried Child
True West

Politics & Philosophy

Jostein Gaarder
Sophie's World
Niccolo Machiavelli
The Prince

Feminist Classics

Shulamith Firestone
The Dialectics of Sex
bell hooks
Feminism is for Everybody
Naomi Woolf
The Beauty Myth

Auto- & Biography

Erik Erikson
Young Man Luther
Frank McCourt
'Tis
Emmeline Pankhurst
My Own Story
James MacGregor Burns
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
Margaret Sanger
Selected Papers
Autobiography

Other Nonfiction

bell hooks
All About Love: New Visions
C.S. Lewis
The Problem of Pain
Margaret Sanger
The Pivot of Civilization
Woman and the New Race

And random articles/speeches/excerpts from...

Helene Cixous
Sigmund Freud
Donna Haraway
Luce Irigaray
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Julia Kristeva
... and others I don't recall at the moment.

A statement of purpose.

2004-05-07T04:50:00.000-05:00

Reading is my main source of knowledge; writing about it is the means by which I retain such knowledge.

Also, I'm obsessive-compulsive.

Hence The Common Reader. Quite logical, really.

Title borrowed from Virginia Woolf with all proper deference. I love, worship and adore her. Perhaps a bit too much.

As to the form this will take? It will depend upon my mood and the work in question, and will I'm sure evolve over time: generally, I mean to record my impressions and reactions, bits of wisdom gained, and, where appropriate, whatever meager bits of insight I might be able to offer.

I have no set reading list or sequence, though I tend to stick to "the classics" and mean to conquer a Bloomian list of the Western canon before I die. I tend to read several books at once, and in general it might be good for me to ingest a healthy diet of:

Eat your vegetables, they're good for you! (Plato, Shakespeare, the Bible)
My favorite, hearty meals (Woolf, Austen, Forster)
Protein and vitamins, to grow up a strong grrrrl! (The feminist classics)
Comfort foods and sugary snacks (a bit of light reading never hurt anyone)

So that's the plan! On with the show!