Conquering the classics

Back in 2010, I posted a list of classic books I found on the Internet. I decided that in the interest of becoming well-read, I would attempt to tackle all of them eventually. And I’ve been working hard on it ever since. Some of the books have become favorites (The Count of Monte Cristo, Gone With the Wind, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland), and some of them (ahem, On The Road) have made me feel like this:

Anyway, I’ve made a lot of progress, and I feel pretty accomplished these days. But recently, I realized that the list was in need of some revisions. In my original post, I noted some duplicates on the list, and some of them don’t seem worthy of this elite selection (Bridget Jones’s Diary? Really?) Plus, some of my literary friends pointed out other classics and popular/important books that are often referenced. 

So here is the updated list. I’m bolding the ones I’ve already conquered to track my progress (and also so I can feel proud of myself!) I’m sure there are a ton of other books I’m missing, so I’ll probably move things around again at some point.

1.   Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2.   The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3.   Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4.   Harry Potter series – JK Rowling
5.   To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6.   Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
7.   Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
8.   His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
9.   Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
10. Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
11. Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
12. Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
13. The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
14. Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
15. Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
16. The Time Traveler's Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
17. Middlemarch – George Eliot
18. Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
19. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
20. Bleak House – Charles Dickens
21. War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
22. The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
23. Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
24. Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
25. Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
26. Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
27. The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
28. Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
29. David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
30. Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
31. Emma – Jane Austen
32. Persuasion – Jane Austen
33. The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
34. Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
35. Animal Farm – George Orwell
36. The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
37. One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
38. A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
39. The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
40. Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
41. Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
42. The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
43. Lord of the Flies – William Golding
44. Atonement – Ian McEwan
45. Dune – Frank Herbert
46. Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
47. A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
48. The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafo
49. A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
50. Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
51. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
52. Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
53. Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
54. Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
55. The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
56. Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
57. On The Road – Jack Kerouac
58. Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
60. Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
61. Moby Dick – Herman Melville
62. Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
63. Dracula – Bram Stoker
64. The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
65. Ulysses – James Joyce
66. The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
67. Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
68. Possession – AS Byatt
69. A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
70. Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
71. The Color Purple – Alice Walker
72. The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
73. Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
74. Charlotte’s Web – EB White
75. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
76. Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
77. The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
78. Watership Down – Richard Adams
79. A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
80. The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
81. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
82. Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
83. Fahrenheit 451 – Ray Bradbury
84. The Fountainhead – Ayn Rand
85. As I Lay Dying – William Faulkner
86. The Call of the Wild – Jack London
87.   Atlas Shrugged – Ayn Rand
88.   A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
89.   The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
90.   Slaugherhouse-Five – Kurt Vonnegut
91.   Invisible Man – Ralph Ellison
92.   Don Quixote – Miguel De Cervantes
93.   Robinson Cruesoe – Daniel Defoe
94.   Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift
95.   Frankenstein – Mary Shelley
96.   Daniel Deronda – George Eliot
97.   Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde – Robert Louis Stevenson
98.   Mrs. Dalloway – Virginia Woolf
99.   Infinite Jest – David Foster Wallace
100. The Phantom of the Opera – Gaston Leroux
101. The House of Mirth – Edith Wharton
102. A Midsummer Night’s Dream – William Shakespeare
103. The Merchant of Venice – William Shakespeare
104. Much Ado About Nothing – William Shakespeare
105. Taming of the Shrew – William Shakespeare
106. Hamlet – William Shakespeare
107. King Lear – William Shakespeare
108. Othello – William Shakespeare
109. Macbeth – William Shakespeare
110. The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
111. Treasure Island – Robert Louis Stevenson
112. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame – Victor Hugo

What else am I missing? Which ones are your favorites? I always love to discuss books, so feel free to comment with thoughts, or add me on Goodreads. Happy reading!

The fabulous Veronica Roth signs books in Tribeca

While this blog is almost focused on music, I do reserve the right to discuss other forms of entertainment. Well today, I'm going to exercise that right, because I'm also a huge book nerd and last week, I went to a Veronica Roth book signing!

For those of you lame enough to not know, Veronica is the New York Times best-selling author of Divergent, a young adult Dystopian novel. Divergent won lots of praise and awards last year, and it was one of those rare books that I could not put down (I confess, I was seriously considered reading a few chapters at work when no one was looking. Not that I would ever actually do such a terrible thing...) So I was psyched that the sequel, Insurgent, was finally coming out on May 1st, and I was even more psyched to hear that Veronica would be celebrating the release day at the Barnes & Noble in Tribeca.

Real talk.

So anyway, last Tuesday night, I was in the audience while Veronica read a small, spoiler-free excerpt from Insurgent (she almost gave something away, but caught herself just in time). She then followed up by answering a few questions. Here's some of the information she gave us:

• There will be a third book in the series, although she herself still has no idea how it will end. 
• Once the series is over, she plans to continue writing young adult literature, but she doubts she will have any ideas leftover for another dystopian story. 
• She also mentioned having an anxiety disorder, and described how even ordered meat at the deli counter makes her nervous. I can only imagine how much stress talking to crowds of strangers must cause, but she seemed so comfortable and casual in front of us that I never would have suspected.
• She chose the name Beatrice for her main character because it was one of the only names she could think of that sounded sort-of old-fashioned but could be shortened into a tough nickname ("Tris"). Likewise, she loved the name Tobias, but has since had tons of fans tell her that's the name of "that blue guy" in Arrested Development.
• One fan asked which faction Veronica would be in, and while she did say that Abnegation was her favorite faction, she ultimately said, "I would just fail at this world."

Truly a terrible photo, but this was the best I could get. 

Have I mentioned how young Veronica is? We both graduated college in 2010 but she's several months younger than I am. So now I feel like the slacker.

Anyway, then I got my book signed! Ta-da:

Yeah, I'm pretty pleased with myself.

She's right though, I will need to be awfully strong while I wait until 2013(!!) for the next book to be out. I tried to make Insurgent last, and in a way, I was semi-successful as I think I made this one last three days instead of two like Divergent. Anyway, the book is full of action and intensity and there's never a dull moment. If you liked the first, you will like this one. But there's not much recapping (thank goodness, I get sick of pages wasted on explaining what happened in the previous book!) so either reread Divergent or check out the recap Veronica recently posted on her blog before you pick it up. Also, so I can pretend this post is about music, see the playlist Veronica listened to while writing.

Finally, if my post wasn't enough for you, check out the archived livestream of the event:

epicreads on livestream.com. Broadcast Live Free