1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die

Peter Boxall's new work, 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, as reviewed by the NYT today (Volumes to Go Before You Die), lead me to create my own personal list of "must reads". Upon starting the task, I found myself breaking things into mental categories:

*Literature: Imperative to my intellectual growth- ie: Ulysses;
*Nostalgia: This book made me love books back when we are just discovering what we love- ie: Little Women;
*Guilty Pleasures: I stayed up until 3 reading this book in one night, though I wouldn't admit it to my friends- ie: Eregon

I've decided to lump them all into a shmorgasborg of booky goodness, disreguarding whether I consider it part of the valid cannon and going purely on whether I enjoyed it enough to read again. As I can't possibly choose from every book I've ever read, (though in the last 3 years I've started keeping a list,) I perused my LibraryThing catalog and picked only from among my own collection. I've left out those which I know will probably belong on the list eventually but that I haven't gotten around to reading yet. (That was harder than you might think, as many of the "snobbery books" are on the yet to read list.) I've also left out plays and books of poetry (I sense future lists for the like...) So here goes, though I've probably forgotten many treasures, I humbly offer:

50 of My Favorite Books (in my collection)(in no particular order):

1. Ulysses - James Joyce
2. The Fountainhead - Ayn Rand
3. Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
4. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -Douglas Adams
5. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
6. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
7. The Blind Assasin- Margaret Atwood
8. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
9. Ham on Rye - Charles Bukowski
10. Post Office - Charles Bukowski
11. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
12. The Awakening - Kate Chopin
13. (Any of the Hercule Poirot mysteries)- Agatha Christie
14. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
15. The Name of the Rose - Umberto Eco
16. The Sound and The Fury - William Faulkner
17. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
18. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
19. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - Jonathan Safran Foer
20. Everything is Illuminated - Jonathan Safran Foer
21. Good Omens - Neil Gaiman
22. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
23. The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
24. High Fidelity - Nick Hornby
25. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
26. (The Lord of the Rings trilogy) - J.R.R. Tolkien
27. The Children of Men - P.D. James
28. Fear of Flying - Erica Jong
29. Girl, Interrupted - Susanna Kaysen
30. On the Road - Jack Kerouac
31. The Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac
32. Fall on Your Knees - Ann-Marie MacDonald
33. Wicked - Gregory Maguire
34. Angela's Ashes - Frank McCourt
35. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
36. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
37. The English Patient - Michael Ondaatje
38. Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
39. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
40. Anthem - Ayn Rand
41. Harry Potter (yes, all of them) - J.K. Rowling
42. Le Petit Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
43. The Winter of Our Discontent - John Steinbeck
44. East of Eden - John Steinbeck
45. Anna Karenina- Leo Tolstoy
46. Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Room of One's Own - Virginia Woolf
48. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
49. Night - Elie Wiesel
50. The Subtle Knife - Philip Pullman

"A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. " - Ayn Rand

I Has a Grammar

I occasionally read the tongue-in-cheek blog Stuff White People Like and thought you might share my amusement in this recent post on Grammar. I chuckled while reading because it's true; I get a not-so-secret satisfaction at pointing out obvious flaws in the newspaper, my coworkers' emails, the regulations coming from our elected officials that I edit everyday... Only yesterday I found myself scoffing at a set of new laws which used that when it should have been who. The caste system is alive and well in America, and you can tell the Sudras by their choice of there vs. their.

To err is human, to forgive divine.

-Alexander Pope