Time to go back to the books, Ladies! Summer reading is fading away slowly (Breaking Dawn, anyone?), let's get ready for Year Two of our delightful Book Club.
Now that we have the six Jane Austen novels under our belts, it's time to move on to new fields of inquiry...and reveal your secret literary shame! Everyone has a book (or two) that you've never read despite its classic status, its blockbuster sales, or the fact that friends near and far have tried repeatedly to foist it on you, praising its brilliance. Sometimes you fake your way through conversations about the basic plot points....sometimes you rail against its overratedness...and sometimes you just don't correct people who assume you must have read it, right?
So let's tackle that rogue's gallery this year -- except for Moby Dick, that's disqualified.
Post a comment below on your personal Hall of Shame reads -- Jane Eyre, perhaps? The Grapes of Wrath? The Corrections? Anything at all by Neal Gaiman? Or Jodi Picoult, Stephen King, or Tolstoy? Let it all hang out, ladies. I'll shuffle everything into a ballot, and we'll vote on the first read.
As for our first get-together, how about Tuesday September 30th, in Watertown? Comments and suggestions welcome.
Shame on! :P
8 comments:
Here are (some of!) my shame titles:
Love In The Time of Cholera
anything by Salman Rushdie
Confederacy of Dunces
Great Expectations
Al Franken's book
any Jon Krakauer book
Freakonomics
and yes...The Hobbit!
The Corrections is a good one...but long.
Memoirs of a Geisha
Huck Fin
Bonfires of the Vanities
There are lots more...a good start though
This is from http://home.comcast.net/~antaylor1/waterstones100.html -- I had a randomhouse list that was littered with g-d. Ayn Rand. I refuse!!! :)
I've only included the books I would actually want to read that I haven't already. Ok, now that I've cropped it, it's also books I've heard of. I fear there are a few on that list I didn't recognize.
5 Joseph Heller Catch-22
6 J.D. Salinger The Catcher in the Rye
10 Irvine Welsh Trainspotting
28 D.H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers
35 John Steinbeck Of Mice and Men
36 Toni Morrison Beloved
37 A.S. Byatt Posession
39 E.M. Forster A Passage to India
43 Gabriel Garcia Marquez Love in a Time of Cholera
49 Evelyn Waugh Brideshead Revisited
52 John Irvine A Prayer for Owen Meaney
68 Robert Persig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
69 E.M. Forster A Room with a View
82 Tom Wolfe The Bonfire of the Vanities
95 Nick Hornby High Fidelity
Oh, goodness, so many to choose from. Off the top of my head, there's:
Jane Eyre (started 4 times, never finished)
The Grapes of Wrath
A Clockwork Orange
Catch-22
The Great Gatsby
A Tale of Two Cities
anything by Isaac Asimov (I know. Shame!)
anything non-Dune by Frank Herbert
Erm... I know there are more, but I think that's a good start.
Hear are a few that have been on my shelf for YEARS, unread.
East of Eden
Uncle Tom's Cabin
Great Expectations.
I'm soooo ashamed.
OH - And Tuesday is SUCH a good day!
Hi! I will have so much more time in the fall so am excited to still have a chance to participate. Ok, here are some of mine:
Cranford
North and South
Sun Also Rises (or anything else Hemingway for shame)
Love in the Time of Cholera (tried to read it in Spanish many times and need to give that idea up!)
I definitely vote for something Dickens, don't really care which one. D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, and Hemingway sound good too. As an American Studies person, I am mortified that I haven't read Uncle Tom's Cabin. And I would also nominate Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God.
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