I got the following list from another blog I recently stumbled upon. Of course, as a "Master" of English Literature (I'm so witty...or nerdy...or conceited), I thought it looked like fun. As indicated on the aforementioned blog, they're not sure whose list this is or why some of these particular books are included. Of course, my feminist pedagogical slant notices immediately that the list is predominantly white, and predominantly male. I also noticed that neither of my favorite authors, William Faulkner and Toni Morrison, made the list. Hmmm...
Nonetheless, I was still fairly pleased (? surprised? not sure what word would be most appropriate here) by the fact that I've read more than half of the books on the list. I also have several in my "to read" pile, and there were quite a few that I felt ashamed to admit that I hadn't yet read. I guess despite my feminist slant, I still feel like I need to conform to the traditional "Canon" on some level.
So, if you're so inclined, let us know how many of these books you've read by doing the following:
1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you started but did not finish.
3) Reprint this list in your own blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 or less and force books upon them.
Also, be sure to leave a comment letting me know that you're taking this challenge. I'd love to see what others have or haven't read. :)
"THE" List
1. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
2. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
3. The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
4. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
5. Life of Pi - Yann Martel—in my “to read” pile
6. The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
7. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
8. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
9. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
10. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
13. His Dark Materials (trilogy) - Philip Pullman (am currently reading)
14. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
15. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
16. The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
18. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
19. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
20. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
21. Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis
22. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – C.S. Lewis
23. Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
24. Animal Farm - George Orwell
25. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
26. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
27. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
28. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
29. Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
30. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
31. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
32. Complete Works of Shakespeare---ummmm, not sure why 'Hamlet' is separate from this listing. Perhaps the anonymous list creators thought it was written by a separate Shakespeare?? lol
33. Ulysses - James Joyce
34. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
35. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
36. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
37. The Bible
38. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
39. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
40. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
41. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
42. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
45. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
46. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
47. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
48. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
49. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
50. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
51. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
52. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
53. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
54. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
55. Middlemarch - George Eliot—in my “to read” pile
56. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
57. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
58. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
59. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
60. Emma - Jane Austen
61. Persuasion - Jane Austen
62. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
63. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
64. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
65. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
66. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
67. Anne of Green Gables – L.M. Montgomery
68. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
69. Atonement - Ian McEwan
70. Dune - Frank Herbert
71. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons—am reading right now
72. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
73. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
74. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
75. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez—in my “to read” pile
76. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
77. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
78. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
79. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
80. Bridget Jones’ Diary - Helen Fielding
81. Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
82. Moby Dick - Herman Melville
83. Dracula - Bram Stoker
84. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
85. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath—in my “to read” pile
86. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
87. Germinal - Emile Zola
88. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
89. Possession - A.S. Byatt
90. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
91. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
92. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
93. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
94. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
95. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
96. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
97. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
98. Watership Down – Richard Adams
99. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
100. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
Friday, July 18, 2008
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Trivializing Truth?
Yet another post about an article link...
I love the Washington Post. When I was in college we got a sweet deal for a student rate for the paper. I think we paid something crazy like $100 for the paper to be delivered every day for an ENTIRE YEAR. How I miss those days! There's nothing better than a nice warm drink and bagel and the Sunday (or really anyday) Post. When we had our current local paper delivered we ended up paying more than that, and let's just say the local paper isn't quite the Washington Post...
Anyways, all that to say I miss the Post and have to console myself with surfing the paper's web page for articles, one of which I'm writing in response to so now I'll get back to what I was intending to post about...
I thought the above article was fantastic. "Mr. Loretta" and I get into all kinds of debates about Wikipedia. He is a HUGE fan and always using it to find information about whatever has captured his interest at that point in time. The English teacher in me is absolutely appalled by it. I don't let my students use it as a source. There's too much of a chance for error. It is too unreliable. I'm one of those "weird" teachers that are mentioned in the article. You know, one of the ones who makes students actually go to the library to do research for their research papers. I guess I find it ironic that my husband, who is a physicist because he thinks physics is fundamental, because it is the closest thing to "truth" that he believes there is, loves Wikipedia and the internet's ability to provide answers. He is constantly talking about how much he wants a cell phone that will enable him to access Wikipedia at any time in order to find an answer to a question he has or in order to resolve any pending arguments he may have. I guess it just seems illogical (bizarre? surreal?) to me that he goes to Wikipedia to provide him with the truth. It's almost as if "truth" has become so commodified in our society that we are desensitized to the fact that "truth" is, well, not always true or correct, and Mr. Loretta (or Optimus, as he requested I call him when I informed him of his bloggy pseudonym--someone *still* loves Transformers a little bit too much) and his adoration of and devotion to Wikipedia is the perfect example of this desensitization.
The internet has made so many things easier in our society. It's wonderful that, although we live so very far away from our families, we can share photographs and videos with one another (although that means I should update the family blog more often...). It's great to be able to email and message those distant family members and friends in order to keep in touch, just as it's a great tool for getting in touch with those friends here in town to arrange various get-togethers or to discuss different things uninterrupted by the important smaller people in our lives.
But at the same time, the internet has made things so much more difficult. I think about the many many email forwards my grandmother sends me vilifying the candidate I'm most likely to support in the presidential election: He's a Muslim! He took his oath of office on the Koran! He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance or put his hand over his heart or look at the flag while doing so! He won't wear that damn flag lapel pin. The list could go on and on. It's become so easy for anyone and everyone to publish their own version of the "truth" that reality often is obscured behind layers and layers of inaccuracies.
And, therein lies the problem with Wikipedia. Anyone can go in and edit a subject to have it say whatever they want it to say. Granted, there are moderators and editors who review the entries and flag or remove inaccurate information, but the fact of the matter is that the sheer volume of entries makes it impossible for said editors or moderators to remove the faulty information in a timely fashion unless they are already keeping a close eye on that particular entry at that particular time. In fact, when I was in graduate school, one of my professors altered the entry on a famous poet with false information. It was up for nearly a week before it was flagged or taken down.
So, taking all of this into consideration, one has to wonder whether Wikipedia, and the Internet for that matter, are beneficial for our society or if they are actually contributing to the trivialization and commodification of truth.
I, for one, certainly don't have an answer.
I love the Washington Post. When I was in college we got a sweet deal for a student rate for the paper. I think we paid something crazy like $100 for the paper to be delivered every day for an ENTIRE YEAR. How I miss those days! There's nothing better than a nice warm drink and bagel and the Sunday (or really anyday) Post. When we had our current local paper delivered we ended up paying more than that, and let's just say the local paper isn't quite the Washington Post...
Anyways, all that to say I miss the Post and have to console myself with surfing the paper's web page for articles, one of which I'm writing in response to so now I'll get back to what I was intending to post about...
I thought the above article was fantastic. "Mr. Loretta" and I get into all kinds of debates about Wikipedia. He is a HUGE fan and always using it to find information about whatever has captured his interest at that point in time. The English teacher in me is absolutely appalled by it. I don't let my students use it as a source. There's too much of a chance for error. It is too unreliable. I'm one of those "weird" teachers that are mentioned in the article. You know, one of the ones who makes students actually go to the library to do research for their research papers. I guess I find it ironic that my husband, who is a physicist because he thinks physics is fundamental, because it is the closest thing to "truth" that he believes there is, loves Wikipedia and the internet's ability to provide answers. He is constantly talking about how much he wants a cell phone that will enable him to access Wikipedia at any time in order to find an answer to a question he has or in order to resolve any pending arguments he may have. I guess it just seems illogical (bizarre? surreal?) to me that he goes to Wikipedia to provide him with the truth. It's almost as if "truth" has become so commodified in our society that we are desensitized to the fact that "truth" is, well, not always true or correct, and Mr. Loretta (or Optimus, as he requested I call him when I informed him of his bloggy pseudonym--someone *still* loves Transformers a little bit too much) and his adoration of and devotion to Wikipedia is the perfect example of this desensitization.
The internet has made so many things easier in our society. It's wonderful that, although we live so very far away from our families, we can share photographs and videos with one another (although that means I should update the family blog more often...). It's great to be able to email and message those distant family members and friends in order to keep in touch, just as it's a great tool for getting in touch with those friends here in town to arrange various get-togethers or to discuss different things uninterrupted by the important smaller people in our lives.
But at the same time, the internet has made things so much more difficult. I think about the many many email forwards my grandmother sends me vilifying the candidate I'm most likely to support in the presidential election: He's a Muslim! He took his oath of office on the Koran! He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance or put his hand over his heart or look at the flag while doing so! He won't wear that damn flag lapel pin. The list could go on and on. It's become so easy for anyone and everyone to publish their own version of the "truth" that reality often is obscured behind layers and layers of inaccuracies.
And, therein lies the problem with Wikipedia. Anyone can go in and edit a subject to have it say whatever they want it to say. Granted, there are moderators and editors who review the entries and flag or remove inaccurate information, but the fact of the matter is that the sheer volume of entries makes it impossible for said editors or moderators to remove the faulty information in a timely fashion unless they are already keeping a close eye on that particular entry at that particular time. In fact, when I was in graduate school, one of my professors altered the entry on a famous poet with false information. It was up for nearly a week before it was flagged or taken down.
So, taking all of this into consideration, one has to wonder whether Wikipedia, and the Internet for that matter, are beneficial for our society or if they are actually contributing to the trivialization and commodification of truth.
I, for one, certainly don't have an answer.
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