To Tide You Over

I'm spreading in Shannon's book meme. (Which was spread from somewhere else, and somewhere else before that, and so on, as all good memes are.)

The rules!

Copy the list of books, then bold the books you have read, underline the ones you read for school, and italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Here goes (with occasional commentary)...

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (I could swear I bought it, but I can't find it. I am ashamed.)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre (The first pop quiz I ever had came when we were reading this book my freshman year in high school. I actually hadn't read the chapter yet (le gasp), but somehow I managed to squeak out a passing grade.)
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife (Loved, loved, loved it.)
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner (I keep intending to read this.)
Mrs. Dalloway (Read it for school and loved it. It gets a bolding.)
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books (No, I don't know why I haven't read it yet, either.)
Memoirs of a Geisha (At an airport flying home, had given away whatever ARC I was reading to a bookseller I was visiting. The magazine stand had a bunch of meh paperbacks and this. I almost missed the call to board my flight, I was so entranced.)
Middlesex (No, but I have read The Virgin Suicides and loved it. Middlesex is on the list to buy.)
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel (I expected to hate it - I did my honors thesis on vampire literature (the English department collectively /facepalmed, I'm sure), so it takes a lot to impress me. Then I found out Kostova did ten years of research for this book. I loved it. I wouldn't shut up about it the whole summer.)
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Y'know... I didn't hate it.)
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
Anansi Boys
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels and Demons (I want those hours back, plzkthx)
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon (So, uh. My friend Eric has been recommending this forever, but when I was wandering the bookstore trying to remember which book he'd raved about, I got confused and thought he'd been talking about Neuromancer (hey, airport bookstore, 6:00 AM, no coffee. My brain wasn't on.) I loved Neuromancer. Now I need to go get Cryptonomicon.
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots and Leaves (Spent the whole book nodding. I would have shouted "Amen!" every few lines, but I read most of it on the train. People tend to look at you funny when you do that.)
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

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There are a lot of books on this list I'd still like to get around to. I'm kind of sad more of them aren't highlighted, but somehow the teachers and professors I had in high school and college deviated wildly from the lists of standard assigned reading. I can't complain, but the list feels light.

Of course, my genres-of-preference, sf/f and horror, don't have a lot of entries on the list unless the books are hugely successful. Hmph.