That Literary Meme

I read. I read quite a bit. Lately, I haven't been reading as much, since I haven't yet married the two hobbies of knitting and reading. Cinema and knitting, yes, the merge has been quite pleasant and natural. Seeing the classics literary meme that has been going around, I realize that I need to get back to reading.

The last thing I've read (outside of comics) is In the Cut by Susanna Moore. I'm impressed at how close the book is to the movie (although the endings...)

Anyway, here is that classics list. Those that are bold I have read completely. I may or may not have liked the work. Those that are italic are works that I want to read. Those that are underlined are works that I've tried to read but didn't like them, thus never finished. Those that are red are things that I've enjoyed in other formats.

Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice(I have a very hard time reading Jane Austen. I don't care for her run-on sentences and multitude of characters. However, I've loved every adaptation of her work for the cinema. Every one.)
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (I want to like this work. I think I just have to be "in the mood" for it. I haven't even watched Apocalypse Now, which I should.)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (I can't believe I haven't read this yet. It's influenced so many works I've loved.)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote "My destiny calls, and I go!"
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (A Christmas Carol is his best work. Especially when performed by Patrick Stewart.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury (I want to like this too. I love the concept of its style, but the one time I tried to pick it up, I couldn't get into it. I will try again.)
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust See description above for Dante's work.)
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch 22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World (Can you believe I haven't read this one yet?)
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House (Don't ask me the details. I read it in high school and hardly remember it.)
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude (I want to like this book too. I like magic realism! I just couldn't get into it.)
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (I've loved Poe since I was a kid. I was always a creepy little one.)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet (An amazing piece of work. Kate Winslet is an amazing Ophelia. Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard is brilliant. Shakespeare rocks my world.)
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth (Everyone must see Scotland, PA, a most amazing adaptation of the Macbeth story.)
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream (I never liked this story. I only began to respect it after seeing a version of it in Neil Gaiman's Sandman)
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (Can I say that I dislike Romeo? I loved the story (and things influenced by it, like West Side Story) until I was in high school, when I reread it for class and realized that Romeo was a drama queen. Juliet is sensible and smart, but her blind adoration for such an immature character as Romeo makes me not like her. Bah, humbug! It still has some of the best writing in history.)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair (Actually, I only want to read it due to the upcoming Mira Nair-directed movie.)
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide "You've been a fool, and so have I, so let's be man and wife."
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son

I don't read much classics. I've always considered myself a "genre girl": science fiction, fantasy, horror, cult. I have an interest in some of the standard classics now, which is a good thing. 26 isn't bad, is it?