A Reading List Meme

I haven't been spending much time blogging lately. All my waking hours have been devoted to reading and writing curriculum, gardening, and walking the girls. Summer school begins soon, and then it will be a frantic push toward final prep for my next year of teaching. Don't get me wrong, I am thrilled that my classroom awaits my return. I just know that any pleasure reading and house repair tasks need to get done now. So I've been away from my blog.

I have been reading quite a bit online and looking for interesting ways to share my students' work and ideas with the world. Through that review process,K8 called my attention to this Reading meme…...

The top 100 or so books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. Want to surprise yourself?

Bold the books you have read, underline the ones you were assigned in school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Since I can’t remember which were read first for school and which for the joy of reading literature, I didn’t underline at all. However, many are on a comp. list from my English graduate program. What surprised me even more were the number of titles I read in high school 25 years ago. Thank you Jeff Shannon (my college-prep English teacher). It makes me question how much we are currently challenging our young students to read excellent literature. Hmmmmm……

Also thinking back to strategies used in high school, perhaps we need to add formatting of titles for which we read the Cliffs / Sparks Notes…..

The List
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
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 Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
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
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
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
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 & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion is this
There is Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
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