Blog Meme

As seen elsewhere, this list has been making its way around. Rather than copy the whole list, I'll just list the ones I've read:

Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man Is Hard to Find
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire - Candide
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Wright, Richard - Native Son

26, unless I forgot how to count, and 35 of the 93 authors. Relatively high, given a pronounced aversion to li-fi, modern or "classic." Obviously, there's a great deal of subjectivity in how the list was calculated, and I'd quibble with a few of the selections. Notably, "A Tale of Two Cities" the only Dickens work, "Crime and Punishment", which looks like the work of a gifted amateur, to borrow Hitchcock's description of his first stab at "The Man Who Knew Too Much," compared to "Karamazov," "Babbitt" instead of "Elmer Gantry," the steaming pile of dog crap that is "Beloved," "The Call of the Wild" is fine for what it is, but it's not all that, "The Three Musketeers" over "Count of Monte Cristo" for Dumas, 2 Henry James selections, "Bartleby the Scrivener," Ford Madox Ford's "The Good Soldier", and the only book on the list I've never heard of, Maxine Hong Kingston's "The Woman Warrior." Bah, I should come up with my own list sometime.