Wednesday, April 10, 2013

More books and such

     Well, here I am again. I took a week off because of spring break at school. Not that I was too busy; I just wanted to be very un-busy, if you know what I mean. But now we are back and I have compiled another part of my list of books. I have found it interesting to look back and see all the good stories I have read. Let me note here - I will not be listing all the books I have picked up, started to read and then either thrown away (literally) or returned disgustedly to my local library. I find that the older I get, or maybe the more well read I become, I don't want to waste what little time I have left on the earth reading bad books, or rather bad writing, just to say I am reading. Oh, and don't look for me to be including Harry Potter on the list. Not interested. Sorry. But not really.
     Currently I am reading The Lost and Forgotten Languages of Shanghai by Ruiyan Xu. Sounds like a non fiction choice but it is a novel, and pretty well written. OK. So, here's another piece of my list. I hope I don't repeat myself! :)Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Emma and Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, The Pilot's Wife and The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, The Fixer Upper by Mary Kay Andrews, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Alices's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, Death Comes for the Archbishop and My Antonia! by Willa Cather, The Awakening by Kate Chopin, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, A Christmas Carol, David Copperfield, Great Expectations all by Charles Dickens, Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Great Gatsby, Tender is the Night, This Side of Paradise all by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Centennial by James Michener, Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Sula all by Toni Morrison, Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Wild Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift, Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse both by Virginia Woolf.
     I must admit here that many of the afore mentioned books were read when I was getting my English degree. Some of them I labored through and some I really enjoyed. I won't tell you which ones fall into the different categories. You'll have to guess.