Better Read Than You

Forty-six percent, or, Don’t Trust Everything You Find Online

Every once in a while, I stumble upon one of these lists online that purports to a be a list of the one-hundred great books you should have read by now. (Instead you’re reading blogs online, aren’t you? Well, of course you get a pass for reading my blog, though you should realize that even though my blog is pretty spectacular writing-wise, I really don’t know if it competes with Homer or Dostoyevsky, so you should probably read summa them too, from time to time.)

So anyway, even though I don’t trust the ethnocentric, heterosexist, misogynistic bent of lists like this, I always have to look, you know? I mean, one of my degrees is in English. So of course the obvious question is: How do I stack up to some random online reading list?

What I’ve read is in bold, sometimes with comments. What I should have read and didn’t is italicized, sometimes with comments.

001 The Iliad - Homer

002 The Odyssey - Homer
I kind of fell in with the wrong crowd--Odysseus and Athena, I mean--when I was a teenager. I remember being face down over Homer’s little tale more than once. It tried to eat me alive.

003 The Aeneid - Virgil

The first three works on this list I read when I was nineteen years old, in an ancient literature course at the community college in Albuquerque. I had a pretty terrific teacher who has since moved on. He used to teach English in prison, which I think prepared him well for teaching English at a community college. (No, he wasn’t in prison. He worked there. Sheesh.)

004 Beowulf - Unknown

I read this in high school and hated it. It had such a empty, wind-swept feel to it. Seriously, it made my insides feel strange.

005 The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
Another community college read. I loved this. (Where’s The Inferno? Because I want credit for having read that, too.)

006 The Travels of Marco Polo - Marco Polo
007 The Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
I was supposed to’ve read this and didn’t. There is absolutely nothing that interests me about Chaucer. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know. I even find some of his plots funny or interesting, but reading Chaucer’s writing is like trying to read using tin cans as reading glasses. (Does that even make sense? I mean, it’s just inaccessible. And I don’t find much reading inaccessible.)

008 Don Quixote - Cervantes
I owned this book for years, but couldn’t get more than twenty pages into it. Such is ownership of a brain with an attention span trained by television.

009 Paradise Lost - John Milton
I read this in a course that was required for the English B.A. (I actually like Paradise Regained a whole lot, too. I want credit for that, too, by the way.) I started to write an honor’s thesis based on the science--astronomy in particular--Milton incorporated in Paradise Lost, but I changed my mind about the whole importance of writing an honor’s thesis and dropped the matter.

010 The Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan

I don’t remember: Is this what Franny Glass is reading when she has her nervous breakdown? (And if you don’t get that literary reference, you are so not cool.)

011 Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
012 Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
I read this shortly after seeing the smart adaptation of the novel on PBS starring that red-headed Englishwoman who used to play a surgeon on ER. (Yeah, I could Google her, but I don’t really care--and I have to, as I get older, be careful what kind of useless knowledge I accumulate. Space is getting kind of tight in the attic, if you know what I mean.)

013 Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
This was one of my favorite books in high school. I don’t know what it was about Swift’s stuff that caught my fancy. It was probably that he was so clever in his critiques of morons and their actions. I really admired that he had the courage--and the mad skillz--to skewer everything. (I mean, have you read A Modest Proposal recently? Swift was the Stephen Colbert of his time.)

014 Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
015 Candide - Voltaire
016 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
I read this in high school. Not by choice.

017 The Tragedy of Faust - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
018 The Lady of the Lake - Sir Walter Scott
I made it about a third of the way through this, which was required reading in high school. Anyone who made it all the way through got an honorary membership to the SCA, right?

019 Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
020 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
I read this because I thought I ought to do it, not because I enjoy Austen’s writing.

021 Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
I think I was supposed to’ve read it in high school, but didn’t actually read it until years later. It sometimes reads like it was written by a teenaged girl--but what kind of teenaged girl comes up with shit like this? Pretty amazing when you think about it.

022 The Red and the Black - Stendahl
023 The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
I can’t tell you the number of times I was supposed to’ve read this for some class or another and didn’t. I tried. No, really. I tried. Several times. Something always turned me back. Maybe it was the name “Natty Bumppo.” I hate the sound of that name. It’s like fingers on a blackboard to me. None of the other names he had were any better. (I mean, come on. “Leatherstockings”? That just freaks my shit right out.)

024 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
025 Carmen - Prosper Merimee
026 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
027 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
I want to love the Bronte sisters, but I don’t. I won’t apologize for it either.

028 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
029 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
030 A Tale of Two Cities - Charles Dickens

I remember asking that English teacher that I mentioned above about Dickens. For as long as I can remember, Dickens has been the writer that I’ve been least interested in reading. (And it’s been a long time. One of the few books in my childhood house of few books was a copy of Dickens’ collected novels that someone gave to my mother as a gift. And though I read everything I could get my hands on when I was a child, I could not force myself to read Dickens, not when I was seven years old, and not now that I am thirty-six years old.) So, that English teacher told me that he enjoyed Dickens because it had such a nostalgic feel to it. And I was, like, I don’t think, as a poor Hispanic chick from Duranes, that I’m ever going to be nostalic for some rich, white man’s past. What gives?

031 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
The one Dickens novel I succeeded in reading. This was in high school, tenth grade. We read most of it aloud in class, which is why.

032 The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Another high school read. I loved Nathaniel Hawthorne. I wonder what he’s up to these days.

033 Camille - Alexandre Dumas
034 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The only Melville I ever made it through was “Billy Budd.” And I thought it sucked. I was a teenager at the time--maybe fourteen?--when I read it and I just had absolutely no interest in this book that had absolutely nothing to do with my life as a teenaged girl. I mean, c’mon.

035 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Read in high school or just after, on my own, when I was still ambitious about literature.

036 Idyls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson
037 Silas Marner - George Eliot
038 Middlemarch - George Eliot
039 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
040 Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
041 Crime and Punishment - Feodor Dostoyevsky
042 The Brothers Karamazov - Feodor Dostoyevsky
043 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
This was one of my favorite books when I was about nine years old. I actually read the whole series of these book. I loved them. I credit Alcott with ensuring that I was the only little Hispanic girl at Duranes Elementary who could speak fluent nineteenth-century English.

044 Far From the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
045 The Adventures of Ton Sawyer - Mark Twain
046 The Prince and the Pauper - Mark Twain
047 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
048 A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain

My knowledge of Twain looks sort of hit-or-miss from that list. But I want credit for having read his travel writing, dammit. That guy was damned smart. I really respect Mark Twain.

049 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
050 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
051 The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
052 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
053 The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
054 The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Do I get credit for the other James novels? I read everything I could by Henry James, though I finally turned back at Daisy Miller.

055 Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
056 The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
057 The Time Machine - H. G. Wells
058 Dracula - Bram Stoker
059 The Way of All Flesh - Samuel Butler
060 Call of the Wild - Jack London
If it weren’t for a lack of ability to tolerate cold weather, I’d’ve moved to Alaska years ago to raise sled dogs and run the Iditerod purely on the basis of Jack London’s writing alone.

061 Babbitt - Sinclair Lewis
062 An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
063 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Of course I’ve read Gatsby, but I also want credit for reading every other novel Fitzgerald wrote except for that last, unfinished Hollywood one, which I just couldn’t get through; That one sucked pretty bad. (I also want credit for having read Zelda Fitzgerald’s novel. )

064 A Farewell to Arms - Ernest Hemingway
065 For Whom the Bell Tolls - Ernest Hemingway
066 The Old Man and the Sea - Ernest Hemingway
I think that, similarly, I should get credit for having read everything Hemingway’s ever written. (And could you throw in some props for the William Faulkner--Hemingway’s smirking detractor--who is suspiciously absent from this list.)

067 The Maltese Falcon - Dashiell Hammett
068 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
069 The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
070 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
I didn’t read this until I was an adult, and then I was, like, wha--?! Why didn’t we read this in middle school? For me, it would have been the perfect read when I was ten: girl protagonist, social relevancy, humor, readability. Oh yeah, that’s why.

071 The Republic - Plato
072 The Prince - Machiavelli
073 The Social Contract - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
074 The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
075 The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
I think every person who studies biology or works in a biological field should be forced (at gunpoint, if necessary) to read this book. Biologists who haven't read Darwin are like English majors who haven't read Shakespeare. Patzers.

076 Das Kapital - Karl Marx
077 The Decline of the West - Oswald Spengler
078 Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
079 Oedipus Rex - Sophocles
In that same ancient literature class, we read a slew of Aeschylus and Sophocles. I want credit for those, too.

(And, my anonymous little list makers, where’s the Euripides?)

080 The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare
081 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
082 Othello - William Shakespeare
083 Macbeth - William Shakespeare
084 The Tempest - William Shakespeare
I think I should get credit for ALL the Shakespeare plays I’ve read, not just this paltry handful.

085 Tartuffe - Moliere
086 Peer Gynt - Henrik Ibsen
087 A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
088 The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
089 Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Rostand
090 The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhovz
091 Our Town - Thornton Wilder
092 Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
093 The Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle
094 Meditations - Rene Descartes
095 The Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
096 The World as Will and Idea - Arthur Schopenhauer
097 Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
098 Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson
099 Walden - Henry David Thoreau
100 How We Think - John Dewey

I definitely don’t trust this list.

I’ve read forty-six works of literature from this arbitrary list of one hundred (which I guess isn’t horrible for a list that is woefully incomplete).

How about you?