Newsweek’s Top 100 Books of All Time (Orly?)

Bold the ones you’ve read, italicize the ones you tried to read & couldn’t finish, and underline those you’d recommend (plus comment freely in parentheses).

1. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, 1869
(You. Have. Got. To. Be. Kidding.)

2. 1984 by George Orwell, 1949
(The drudgery of finishing this book stuck with me for a long, long, loooong time.)

3. Ulysses by James Joyce, 1922

4. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, 1955
(I read it because it’s supposed to be naughty. It’s not naughty, it’s ridiculously stupid.)

5. The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, 1929
(Is this about a ship? Did I maybe see the movie? Or was that Master and Commander?)

6. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, 1952
(This wasn’t science fiction, was it? If it was, I may hunt it down and read it.)

7. To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf, 1927
(Didn’t she kill herself? I know nothing else about this.)

8. The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer, 8th century B.C.E.
(Oh, the boredom. I couldn’t even finish the Cliff Notes, it was so boring.)

9. Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, 1813
(19th-century chick lit, right? I don’t even like modern chick lit, why would I read this?!)

10. Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri, 1321
(I hear it’s snarky. Maybe someday I’ll try reading it.)

11. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer, 15th century
(Wasn’t this a bunch of medieval soap opera stuff? I don’t like modern soap opera stuff, for crying out loud.)

12. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift, 1726
(Hated the movie. At least I think it was a movie based on this book. There was teensy people tying the guy down with ropes, right? Boring.)

13. Middlemarch by George Eliot, 1874
(Wasn’t George Eliot a chick? That’s all I know about this.)

14. Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, 1958
(Never heard of this book. Or this author.)

15. The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, 1951
(Aren’t crazed shooting-spree murderers supposed to like this book?)

16. Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, 1936
(I read it because Lyse loves it. It actually wasn’t bad. Pretty sure it wouldn’t make my personal Top 100, though!)

17. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1967
(Never heard of this book. Or this author.)

18. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925
(Wasn’t this about a reporter? I can’t imagine any book about a reporter being interesting.)

19. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, 1961
(Not a clue.)

20. Beloved by Toni Morrison, 1987
(Figures, the only book in the top 20 written after my birth, and I’ve never heard of it. Or the author.)

21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck, 1939
(I read the synopsis of the movie and decided it sounded too depressing to bother.)

22. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, 1981
(The author that someone put a hit out on because he pissed off some Muslims, right?)

23. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, 1932
(I tried, honestly. It’s a “sci fi classic” and I really love science fiction…but I couldn’t do it. Boooring.)

24. Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, 1925
(Never heard of this book.)

25. Native Son by Richard Wright, 1940
(Never heard of this book. Or this author.)

26. Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, 1835
(I might read this some day just because it sounds like it would make a good documentary. But a French guy writing about the USA, when the USA was less than 60 years old and the rest of the world thought democracy was pure nonsense? I have my doubts about it…)

27. On the Origins of Species by Charles Darwin, 1859
(I bet that 99.9% of the people who are against the theory of evolution have not read this. I bet that 99.5% of people who are for the theory of evolution have not read this. I know I haven’t.)

28. The Histories by Herodotus, 440 B.C.E.
(I’ve heard of this guy in documentaries, and he sounded cool, so I might read this someday.)

29. The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, 1762
(Never heard of this book. Or this author.)

30. Das Kapital by Karl Marx, 1867
(I bet that 99.9% of the people who are against Marxism have not read this. I bet that 99.5% of people who are for Marxism have not read this. I know I haven’t.)

31. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli, 1532
(One of the few books I tried to read & couldn’t finish that I might actually try to read again someday.)

32. Confessions by St. Augustine, 4th century
(Sounds naughty. But I bet it isn’t. I bet it’s boring.)

33. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, 1651
(Never heard of this book. Or this author.)

34. The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, 431 B.C.E.
(Sounds like a documentary on the History Channel. This means I might actually try reading it someday.)

35. The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien, 1954
(Oh, the boredom! The shrieking boredom! I didn’t see the movies, either.)

36. Winnie-the-Pooh by A. A. Milne, 1926
(The first 6 or 7 years of my life revolved around Pooh, but eventually I GREW UP. Utterly ridiculous that this book — or any other book that only requires a third-grade reading level — is on the list.)

37. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis, 1950
(Read it in childhood, and I remember almost nothing about it. Didn’t see the movie either.)

38. A Passage to India by E. M. Forster, 1924
(Wasn’t this made into a movie with Meryl Streep? Or was that Out of Africa? Anyway, never read either one.)

39. On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 1957
(Wasn’t this guy the original poseur? That whole beatnik thing was all about being poseurs, right?)

40. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, 1960
(I read this because my kid was forced to read it for school, and I couldn’t believe it was as bad as she made it out to be. But it WAS. Absolutely THE most boring piece of crap I’ve forced myself through. I watched the movie, hoping it would somehow redeem this tedious waste of time. Nope. It was simply atrocious.)

41. The Holy Bible by ?
(I’ve actually read most of it. And despite being very much not a Christian — in fact, I’m a witch/pagan/heathen type — I highly recommend it. Some of it’s just morbid fascination about the oddities of beliefs of certain cultures in history, and some of it’s flat-out prurient entertainment. However, some of it really IS incredibly good stuff. I’m personally shocked and dismayed that it didn’t make the Top 10 on this list. <--not sarcasm!)

42. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, 1962
(I tried, and really wanted to finish it. Couldn’t do it…it just made no sense. Watched the movie and was mildly creeped out. Not by the story so much as by the horrible acting of Malcolm McDowell.)

43. Light in August by William Faulkner, 1932
(Never heard of the book. Vaguely heard of the author. Did he write Thorn Birds?)

44. The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903
(Sounds like a winner. I’m only being a smidgen sarcastic in saying that. It really does sound like it could be fascinating. It also sounds like the kind of book a bunch of white people would claim was amazing because it’s politically correct of them to do so.)

45. Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, 1966
(Never heard of book or author. Sounds like a bad romance.)

46. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, 1857
(Really sounds like a bad romance.)

47. Paradise Lost by John Milton, 1667
(Poetry? Really?)

48. Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, 1877
(From the guy who brought you War & Peace? Please.)

49. Hamlet by William Shakespeare, 1603
(Forced to read it in school. Hated it. Really tried to like it when I dated a guy who was a theatre major and wild about Shakespeare. Still hated it. Tried watching the movie, figured anything with Mel Gibson couldn’t suck too bad, right? Wrong. Still hated it. My 16-year-old really likes Shakespeare, though — she bought the “complete works of” at a used bookstore completely on her own initiative. Go figure.)

50. King Lear by William Shakespeare, 1608

51. Othello by William Shakespeare, 1622

52. Sonnets by William Shakespeare, 1609

53. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman, 1855
(Poetry sucks. Unless it’s by Shel Silverstein or Rudyard Kipling, thanks.)

54. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, 1885
(Another “forced to read in school” book. Another author that I can’t, for the life of me, understand how he gets such rave reviews.)

55. Kim by Rudyard Kipling, 1901
(Based on the multiple recommendations of science fiction authors that I respect and admire, I am determined to read everything by Rudyard Kipling sooner or later. What I’ve read so far is pretty impressive.)

56. Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, 1818
(Possibly the first “science fiction” novel ever. I kinda have to read it, yes? Someday I will.)

57. Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, 1977
(Never heard of the book or author. I must admit being prejudiced against it simply by learning it was featured by Oprah’s book club.)

58. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey, 1962
(Honestly can’t remember if I read it, or just was really, really impressed by the movie.)

59. For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway, 1940
(Meh. Doesn’t sound interesting.)

60. Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, 1969
(Wasn’t the author some whiny peacenik with a chip on his shoulder who couldn’t write decent science fiction so he wrote this?)

61. Animal Farm by George Orwell, 1945
(I think they tried to make me read this in school, but by then I was so disgusted with the required reading list that I cheerfully took an F.)

62. Lord of the Flies by William Golding, 1954
(I may actually read this someday because I hear it’s gory and creepy. Sweet.)

63. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, 1965
(Didn’t they make a movie about this guy writing this book? How good could it be if they made a movie about him writing the book, rather than a movie about the subject matter of the book?)

64. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, 1962
(Never heard of the book or author.)

65. Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, 1913
(Never heard of the book.)

66. The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler, 1939
(Okay, wait a minute. A detective novel? Are you fuq’ing joking?!)

67. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, 1930
(Never heard of the book.)

68. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, 1926
(So this is chick lit for tough guys? Stupid.)

69. I, Claudius by Robert Graves, 1934
(Sounds like Gladiator meets My Left Foot. Interesting apart, not so much together.)

70. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers, 1940
(Never heard of the book or author.)

71. Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence, 1913
(Sounds kinky. However, there’s no way kinky would make this list. Therefore it must be dull as dishwater.)

72. All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren, 1946
(Politics? Yawn.)

73. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin, 1953
(Never heard of the book or author.)

74. Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White, 1952
(Okay, this is a great book. However, it’s not THAT great. The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett was tremendously better.)

75. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, 1902
(Never heard of the book or author.)

76. Night by Elie Wiesel, 1958
(Isn’t this the Diary of Anne Frank revisited?)

77. Rabbit, Run by John Updike, 1960
(Never heard of the book. Not real clear on why Updike is considered a great writer.)

78. The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton, 1920
(Never heard of the book or author.)

79. Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth, 1969
(Never heard of the book or author.)

80. An American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser, 1925
(Never heard of the book or author.)

81. The Day of the Locust by Nathanael West, 1939
(A cheesy horror flick. Oh, wait, that movie probably wasn’t about this book. Okay, I’ve never heard of this book or author.)

82. Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller, 1934
(I hear this is a naughty book. I doubt it’s all that. Didn’t this guy get famous for being in a three-way?)

83. The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett, 1930
(Another private dick novel? Clearly someone who likes fedoras stacked the deck on this list.)

84. His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, 1995
(Fantasy, and quite yawn-inducing fantasy at that. I lost interest two chapters into The Golden Compass.)

85. Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather, 1927
(Never heard of the book or author.)

86. The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, 1900
(The dude was seriously twisted in some ways and a total whack-job in others. I can’t imagine wanting to read this, other than for the sheer amazement of how much he got wrong.)

87. The Education of Henry Adams by Henry Adams, 1918
(Never heard of the book or author.)

88. Quotations from Chairman Mao by Mao Zedong, 1964
(Brainwashing, anyone? Hey, wasn’t this the guy who made our nation’s “nanny government” look like a utopia of civil freedoms? Ew.)

89. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature by William James, 1902
(This may possibly be the only book on this list that I’m extremely eager to read. Apparently it’s about “spirituality” in the sense of “nature religion/paganism without the deities”. Sounds intruiging.)

90. Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh, 1945
(Isn’t this a PBS soap opera for old fogeys? Yawn.)

91. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, 1962
(So ridiculously overblown and overrated, it’s not funny. Twisted into a manifesto by the eco-terrorist wing nuts. She died in 1964, and probably would be appalled at how people have used her work.)

92. The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money by John Maynard Keynes, 1936
(The only thing more boring than politics? Economics! Not to mention there’s far more fortune-telling in economics than anything resembling science or sensibility.)

93. Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, 1900
(Never heard of the book or author.)

94. Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves, 1929
(You know what they call people who find reading autobiographies fun & interesting? Fanboys/girls, that’s what!)

95. The Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith, 1958
(Never heard of the book or author.)

96. The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame, 1908
(I may have read a page or two of this. I can’t recall and it looks drearily dull anyway.)

97. The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley and Malcolm X, 1965
(See my note above about autobiographies. Besides, militantly angry stuff is just stupidly annoying.)

98. Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey, 1918
(Never heard of the book or author.)

99. The Color Purple by Alice Walker, 1982
(Looked angry and depressing. So not my cuppa.)

100. The Second World War by Winston Churchill, 1948
(Politicians writing about history that they just got done making strikes me as absurdly short-sighted, not to mention way too biased to be anything other than fan service.)

I rather enjoyed reading the comments on the Newsweek article. Here are excerpts from my favorite comments:

“An absolutely ridiculous list…you might as well have just given us Oprah’s word. Way too American in fiction, way too leftist and pseudo-scientific in other fiction.”

The Golden Compass? Are you smoking crack?

Yeah, that about sums it up.

I really, truly did — reading this.

I’m never going to forget this phrase: “there’s a little F-16 in my pants.”

Wendi Aarons is my new hero. I would read her blog at work for the stress relief, but I’m pretty sure my manager would call in Animal Control to deal with the hyena in my cubicle.

(I know it’s been 4 days since my wedding and I haven’t blogged it. I will, I promise. Just waiting for My Number One Internet Fanboy and Official Wedding Photographer to get me some piccies. Also my stress levels need to be brought down by at least a few nights on the luscious 500-thread count sheets that Geoffrey’s awesome aunt got us, which are finally going on the bed tonight.)

Geoffrey and I got married today. Still mind-boggled by it. Details soon, but for now I must collapse…sooo exhausted. It was a pretty amazing day, all told.

Are you fuq’ing KIDDING?! That much money for some dead flowers and a stickpin?!

I’m beside myself. Thank heavens he only ordered corsages for the moms and me, and boutonnieres for himself and his dad. (When I heard boutonnieres are only $8, I said he should have gotten those for all of us.) He ordered purple roses, which is really sweet…but, if they have ANY scent whatsoever, I won’t be able to have a corsage, because rose oil is one of my strongest migraine triggers.

I’m still mind-boggled. EIGHTY-FIVE DOLLARS for a bouquet? (Do you know how many books I could buy with $85?!) Clearly, not liking flowers has saved me a fortune over the years. I will never understand how some people are willing to pay that kind of money for something so incredibly useless.

• Buy a new bra (and probably shoes)
• Get some speakers for my iPod
• Dye my hair (I may be 40 but I refuse to be gray!) & get it trimmed
• Buy the sparkling cider & grape juice
• Finish getting the ceremony written
• Order the corsages for the moms & boutonniere for Geoffrey’s dad
• Check the site for logistical surprises & do a brief walk-through
• Finish sewing the dresses!

It may seem like there’s a lot left to do, but actually most of the preparations are already finished. We have a dinner at Geoffrey’s parents house on Saturday night (eve of the wedding), so all this has to be done by late Saturday afternoon. I am hugely glad that I took these vacation days to prepare, or we would be completely FUBAR.

And my sixpence arrived in the mail today!!! It’s gorgeous, and the lady who took my order was so incredibly nice. When I called to order, she asked if I had a special year in mind, and I said no (they stopped making them 2 years before my birth year, which was the only year which popped to mind). Then she suggested one that’s a century old, to commemorate the year of the wedding, and I thought that was brilliant! So I have a 1909 King Edward VII sixpence for my shoe!

So tonight Geoffrey & I will do a bit of wedding-preparation shopping. Normally I hate all shopping unless it’s for books, but I promised myself a bra from Vicky’s, and I don’t mind shopping there too much. Except for all the ridiculous pink decor.

Silly me overlooked the fact that Sebastian was in hunting mode, and decided to take her out of her cage. (That’s not a typo; Sebastian is female — Anxiety named her before we found out her gender.) When she first bit me, I honestly didn’t feel it. I mean, her entire head is about the size of the fingernail on my ring finger, so you can imagine how tiny her teeth are. But she’s got quite the bite pressure! I tried wedging a fingernail between my skin and her teeth, and absolutely could not do it. So I had Lyse take some pics with her cell phone while I waited for Sebastian to let go.

As I waited, Sebastian decided to subdue her prey’s squirming by grinding her little teeth, which I definitely did feel. Still, it didn’t exactly hurt, it just wasn’t comfortable. And Sebastian showed no interest in letting go! Remembering how I got the last snake that bit me (which was a 5-foot boa constrictor) to release its bite (they stop biting when they figure out that you’re too big to eat), I gently shook my hand — and Sebastian — a few times. Presto, she let go.

I now have several pinprick-sized bite holes that did actually bleed a few drops, and a small but significant amount of bruising around them. Since over 90% of reptiles do carry salmonella in their system, the treatment for a non-venomous bite is pretty simple: wash the hell out of it, plus Neosporin to prevent secondary infection. I’m sure all the marks will be gone in less than a week (unlike the bite from the 5-foot boa, which left small scars that didn’t fade for a few years, since the skin was actually slightly torn).

Also today, I got a much better birthday gift, from Kylanath! She got me a couple cookbooks from my Powell’s wishlist (that I really wanted but probably wasn’t ever going to buy for myself), and a pair of kick-ass drinking glasses: a gorgeous blue one that says “Bitch” and a beautiful purple one that says “Slut.” Woo hoo! I’m seriously envious of both her ability to choose amazing gifts, and her phenomenal gift-wrapping talents. (Due to my extra-special birthday migraine, I forgot to take her pressie over when I dropped in on her this evening, so she’ll get it this weekend.)

In family news, my niece is off the ventilator and out of intensive care. She’s still having problems breathing, but the doctors said that is normal when someone is on the ventilator for a long time. I guess she has to cough up all the crap that built up while she couldn’t cough. They finally got a PICC line in, and that way they don’t have to stick her with so many needles. Things look good, except that she’s been running a fever, and doesn’t have much of an immune system at the moment, so they’re watching that very closely. The only visitors she’s allowed to have are her parents & sisters.

In wedding preparation news, my sewing machine decided to go on the fritz last night when I was halfway done making the first bridesmaid dress. I’ve had the damned thing for TEN YEARS and it’s never given me problems. NEVER. So, of course, this gets blamed on Murphy’s Law. I’m going to fiddle with it a bit more, and if that doesn’t help, it’ll be time to locate a repair shop that won’t charge me more than the blasted machine is worth.

Lyse keeps telling me to relax, that I’m on vacation. I’m not, really. I don’t have to go to work, but it’s not exactly a vacation — or, at the most, it’s a working vacation. I’m not even going to think about all the stuff we have yet to finish for the wedding preparations. Gah.

Katie stopped breathing at the urgent care clinic. Luckily it was directly across the street from an emergency room, and they rushed her over there and got her resuscitated. Then she stopped breathing again. They brought her back again, and life-flighted her to the children’s hospital in Tacoma. By the time they got her there, her breathing was so poor that they decided to intubate her.

But Katie’s a fighter, and she fought so hard that 5 adults couldn’t hold her still enough to be intubated before they finally gave up and sedated her first. They did an MRI and found that she has an enlarged heart, as well as a cancerous mass around her heart, which apparently had been depressing her lungs enough to cause the breathing problems. The doctors told my sister they’d never seen a mass in that location so large in a child that size. Finally, they ran blood tests which returned an initial diagnosis of leukemia, and started her on chemotherapy.

Saturday they did a bone marrow test to further refine the diagnosis, and it confirmed the earlier tests. They decided to keep her sedated, in a medically-induced coma, until she no longer needs to be intubated. They continued the chemo, which started improving her blood counts immediately, but not anywhere near close enough to be hopeful. By Sunday night, the doctors told my sister that Katie had to have radiation or there was little chance she’d survive another day, but that the dosage necessary to improve the situation left Katie at very high risk of future cancer. Of course my sister told them to do whatever was necessary to save her.

She’s still in the coma, still intubated, and there’s a good chance she’ll be in the hospital for a month or so for the initial treatments, with a likelihood that she’ll have to have upwards of 2 years of chemotherapy. They’ll take her off the ventilator (and the sedation) as soon as her blood oxygen improves. At this point, they’re not even 100% certain that she hasn’t suffered some impact from oxygen deprivation on Friday night. The only hopeful sign is that today when they changed the IV lines (and so the sedation was slightly lifted), my sister was talking to her and squeezing Katie’s hand, and Katie squeezed back.

At this point, we just don’t know anything more. Every good sign seems to be countered with a bad sign. I asked if they’d given my sister any long-term prognosis, and they haven’t. My sister and my mom are the kind of people who wouldn’t want to know, anyway, unless they could hear that there’s a 100% chance of everything turning out just fine. And of course there’s not a 100% chance.

My sister has two other daughters, who are 10 and 19. The eldest just got married and is expecting a baby in November. Luckily she’s being a real trouper and taking charge of her 10-year-old sister at home while their mom stays at the hospital with the youngest. Both grandmothers are in the area, helping with meals and laundry and such. There’s really nothing I can do to help, except to pray, which I’m doing.

It will be a very long time before Katie is out of danger. At this point, we don’t even know how certain it is that she’ll reach her fifth birthday, which is in 7 weeks. Hopefully she’s enough of a fighter.

And some actors I really like are in it! *squee!*

Ever since BSG ended, my television viewing has largely consisted of NCIS and House marathons on USA Network (while crocheting or cross-stitching, because I cannot just sit and watch TV), interspersed with the occasional show on NatGeo or one of the Discovery channels involving natural disasters (”Is there anything better than a natural disaster?”), death and other taboos, or really cool science shows. Let’s face it, TV mostly sucks. Thank the gods for Netflix!

Here’s hoping ABC doesn’t screw it up. I can’t remember the last time I watched a “regular” network channel other than CBS.