Rising to the challenge...

[strange_complex]

OK, so which of kharin's top 100 books have I read?


1. Apuleius – The Golden Ass
2. Margaret Atwood – The Handmaid’s Tale
3. James Baldwin – Giovanni’s Room
4. Charlotte Bronte - Villette
5. Emily Bronte – Wuthering Heights
6. JG Ballard – Cocaine Nights
7. JG Ballard – The Atrocity Exhibition
8. Paul Bowles – Let It Come Down
9. Bertolt Brecht – The Threepenny Opera
10. Mikhail Bulgakov – The Master and Margarita
11. Anthony Burgess – Earthly Powers
12. William Beckford - Vathek
13. William Burroughs – Naked Lunch
14. Samuel Butler – Erewhon
15. Albert Camus – The Fall
16. Albert Camus – The Plague
17. Truman Capote – In Cold Blood
18. Lewis Carroll – Alice in Wonderland
19. Angela Carter – The Bloody Chamber
20. Willa Cather – Death Comes for the Archbishop
21. Kate Chopin – The Awakening
22. JM Coetzee – The Master of St Petersburg
23. Wilkie Collins – No Name (nope, but I have read The Woman in White, though: very good)
24. Dennis Cooper - Frisk
25. Joseph Conrad – Nostromo
26. Thomas De Quincey – Confessions of an English Opium Eater
27. Daniel Defoe – Roxana
28. Charles Dickens – Bleak House
29. Charles Dickens – Little Dorrit
30. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment
31. Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Devils
32. Umberto Eco – The Name of the Rose
33. George Eliot – Middlemarch
34. George Eliot – The Mill on the Floss
35. Henry Fielding – Tom Jones
36. Ford Madox Ford – The Good Soldier
37. EM Forster – Howards End
38. John Fowles – The French Lieutenant’s Woman
39. Jean Genet – Querelle of Brest
40. Andre Gide – The Immoralist
41. William Godwin – Caleb Williams
42. William Golding – Lord of the Flies
43. Ivan Goncharov – Oblomov
44. Juan Goytisolo – The Garden of Secrets
45. Thomas Hardy – Jude the Obscure
46. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter (Nope, but again I've read The Marble Faun, which I loved!)
47. ET Hoffmann – The Tales of Hoffmann
48. Joseph Heller – Catch 22
49. Herman Hesse – Narziss and Goldmund
50. Michel Houellebecq - Platform
51. Aldous Huxley – Brave New World
52. Homer – The Odyssey
53. Huysmans – Against Nature
54. Christopher Isherwood – The Berlin Novels
55. James Joyce – A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
56. Franz Kafka – The Trial
57. Soren Kierkegaard – Either/Or
58. Arthur Koestler – Darkness at Noon
59. Milan Kundera – Immortality
60. William Langland – Piers Plowman
61. DH Lawrence – Women in Love
62. Mikhail Lermontov – A Hero of Our Time
63. Doris Lessing – The Golden Notebook
64. Malcolm Lowry – Under The Volcano
65. Thomas Mann – Buddenbrooks
66. Sandor Marai - Embers
67. Gabriel Garcia Marquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
68. Charles Maturin – Melmoth the Wanderer
69. Francois Mauriac - Therese
70. Herman Melville – Moby Dick
71. William Morris – News From Nowhere
72. Iris Murdoch – The Sea, The Sea
73. Robert Musil – The Confusions of Young Torless
74. Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
75. Friedrich Nietzsche – Thus Sprach Zarathustra
76. Flannery O’Connor – Wise Blood
77. George Orwell – Burmese Days
78. Walter Pater – Marius the Epicurean (Had to read it for a course on Classical Receptions. Got very sick of his sub-clauses within sub-clauses within sub-clauses.)
79. Mervyn Peake – Gormenghast
80. Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet
81. Petronius – The Satyricon
82. Edgar Allan Poe – Selected Tales (I've read all his short stories, so I presume I've read whatever's in here)
83. Joesph Roth – The Radetzky March
84. JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye
85. Jean Paul Sartre – Nausea
86. Mary Shelley – Frankenstein
87. Stendhal – The Red and The Black
88. Bram Stoker - Dracula
89. Jonathan Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
90. William Makepeace Thackeray – Vanity Fair
91. Leo Tolstoy – Anna Karenina
92. Ivan Turgenev – Fathers and Sons
93. Mark Twain – Pudd’nhead Wilson
94. Voltaire – Candide
95. Oscar Wilde – The Portrait of Dorian Gray
96. Mrs Humphrey Ward – Robert Elsmere
97. Jeanette Winterson – The Passion
98. Virginia Woolf – To The Lighthouse
99. Edith Wharton – Ethan Frome
100. Yevgeny Zamyatin - We

Comments

[ladyguinevere83.livejournal.com]

Eek, I only got three in this list!

Alice in Wonderland
Lord of the Flies
Gulliver's Travels.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

So make your own that you get 100 in! ;)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmmm, 13, which isn't too bad for an ignorant sciences student :)

On the other hand - how do you know kharin? Yet further evidence that everyone knows everyone else.

[strange-complex.livejournal.com]

Actually, I found him during a hopeful trawl through the Latest LJ Posts (http://www.livejournal.com/stats/latest.bml), looking for interesting people. When I realised he knew you, it was another one amongst many reasons to friend him! Do you know him IRL? For that matter, could I ever have met him through you?

[venta.livejournal.com]

Ah. I doubt you'll ever have met him through me - we used to work together, up until the Big Redundancy Demon visited us on the Ides of March earlier this year.

I'm slightly relieved to find that you don't know him IRL (yet), LJ has managed to convince me that there are only about 200 real people in the world, and they're all already acquainted.

[addedentry.livejournal.com]

16 over here, but now I have a reading list (-:

Alarmingly, I can't remember when I stumbled on kharin's journal, but it was surely through a polyfriendly person like you or verlaine: everyone knows you, ergo everyone knows everyone else at one remove. No need for a conspiracy.

[venta.livejournal.com]

everyone knows you

More people know Tom Fool than Tom Fool knows :)

No need for a conspiracy.

That, however, is something of a relief :)

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

Twas verlaine, I think.

[ex-kharin447.livejournal.com]

No, no, no, the point is to produce your own list rather than depressing yourself by only getting a few of somebody else's list. Mind you, that prospect sounds easier than it actually is and I ending up spending a lot more time on the above list than I originally intended (by which point it had become more of an issue of not being defeated by something that should be trivial). So maybe not.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell (I was forced to read it and no, I wouldn't recommend it) discusses 'polyfriendliness' - it mentions things like the people sent to rouse towns and villages about British troop landings during the American civil war; how one person sent to do this roused much of his state because he had a good set of personal connections who had in turn a good set of connections, whereas the other person sent out for the same purpose had much less success. I suspect I fall into the latter category but a number of the people in that set fall into the former. I hope that rather alarmingly recursive description makes sense...

Yes, Pater's prose style is lugubrious at best.