101 Greatest Books- Jane Eyre #5

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

While I am on a Bronte kick I thought I should go ahead and tackle Jane Eyre. Jane, Jane, Jane you and I have a complicated relationship. On again off again for years. I feel like I have a high school relationship with this text. Moving from love to hate in a blink of an eye only to make up one raining weekend when there is nothing else to do and starting the cycle over again.

You see the problem is I have read Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea. I know Jane is supposed to be the first great feminist hero way ahead of her time and redefining the claustrophobic boundaries of her female contemporaries. But you see, I can not unread Wide Sargasso Sea and Rhy's Bertha is a intertextual sledge hammer to the original text. So stretched somewhere between 1847, 1966, and now I look for the space to fit the pieces of Jane Eyre back together for me. I may have to wait for a rainy weekend.

I am interested to know if you have ever read one book that has forever changed the way you will read another?

101 Greatest Books- Wuthering Heights #4

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

The first time I read Wuthering Heights I was a senior in high school in AP Lit class. There were about 20 of us crammed in Coach Weeks trailer in the back of the over-crowded school. Having a coach as an AP English teacher would be surprising to some but Coach Weeks was my Varsity Soccer coach. In the four years I played for him I never once doubted his intellect and talent for the game of soccer. I knew he was an English teacher but I never imagined I would have him as my AP English teacher senior year. He made us run sprints until we hurled and do push ups in the mud so when I sat in his cramped trailer and cried as he read WH aloud to us with tears in his eyes I had one of those life changing moments. The moment when you realize what you think you know of the world is very different than how the world is and you stretch beyond yourself to make a new meaning. It was so with me as tears streamed down my face listening to the passion and anguish of Heathcliff and Catherine's love read by a Coach I admired so much. In that moment I learned how connected we are by literature and the vast power of the written word. I knew then I wanted to be a part of that.

So years later I have sat in front of hundreds of students getting choked up reading To Kill a Mockingbird or Of Mice and Men or pretty much anything by Shakespeare (except Julius Ceasar) hoping that one of them would open their heart to the words and find the power for themselves.

101 Greatest Books- To Kill a Mockingbird #3

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

It is difficult to write about something I love so much. I face the fear that I will leave out something important, something significant, something revealing. So instead of trying to concisely collect my thoughts on one of my favorite books of all time I am going to have to approach this stream of consciousness style.

I first read TKAM as a young girl. I did not understand much of the plot,especially all that was happening at the trial, but even then the characters danced off the page at me. The tomboy in me really wanted to be friends with Scout and I think I had a crush on Jem.

I have a first edition copy of the book. It has typos and grammatical errors. This gives me hope.

Quotes from the novel run through my head and I will always laugh at Scout asking Atticus to "pass the damn ham".

I love the conspiracy theories and the mysterious surrounding Harper Lee.

Every time I read TKAM it breaks my heart.

I can't decide how I feel about Atticus Finch as a father. As a lawyer and as a man he is without reproach, but with each read I am more and more conflicted how a feel about his role as a father.

I don't like red geraniums because they always make me think of the Ewells.

I came home the other day from the store and Kevin had CB in his lap reading Chapter 10 aloud to her. I will cherish that memory forever.

101 Greatest Books- Pride and Prejudice #2

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

Jane Austen and I became friends late in life. I completely missed her in my British lit classes and since I have always gravitated toward American Literature I never pursued a relationship with her. She was one of those writers who fell somewhere between Shakespeare and the Brontës and unbelievably I don't think I ever cracked one of her novels until grad school.

At some point I caught part of the Masterpiece Theater Pride and Prejudice epic movie with Colin Firth. I have always loved Colin Firth and I think my crush on him drove me to the novel. So it began.

The Bennets, Darcy, and even Mr Bingley began to dance in my head and invade my dreams. I fell in love with them and their beautiful, small world. Then, when the darkness of the decline and death of my mother began to be my world I fought off my grief and sadness with Jane and the world she seemingly created just for me. Kevin bought me her entire works bound in one book. It is a beast of a book but one of my most beloved. Her characters befriended me then and still captivate me today after too many rereads to count.

I love the wit of Jane Austen. I retreat to her novels, especially P&P, to keep my wits about me.

Grendel and a Smoking Pipe : Beowulf

Going through the 101 Greatest Books List put together by the College Board. Their original list is in alphabetical order. I am approaching it in no particular order of my own....

I decided to begin at the beginning in my journey through the 101 Greatest Book List.

So I begin with Beowulf. I remember reading parts of Beowulf in high school. It was not a life altering experience. I remember we learned a brief history of the English language with the unit and then blazed through Beowulf and moved on down the time-line of English Literature probably onto Canterbury Tales.

However, my relationship with the hero of ages gone changed drastically in college. The second semester my Freshmen year I entered Dr Martin's class as a wide-eyed English major taking my first upper-level English course. Dr Martin was an icon on campus. The kind of professor you see in the movies. He had a deep raspy voice, white tasseled hair, and smoked a pipe. I remember he smelled of tobacco, tweed, and dusty paper. I loved him from the start. I had Dr Martin in his last semester of teaching before he retired. So guess what professors do on their last tour of duty before they hang up their hats? They teach exactly what they want, the way they want with no apologies.

So, we read Beowulf in its original Old English for two months. Softly, deeply he read the great poem. I was in awe. I tried to follow along.

Somehow the two great men have been intertwined in my memory. So Dr Martin has become the great hero who battles the monsters and becomes king as he smoked his pipe and recited the thousand year old lines from his worn copy of Beowulf.

Have you read Beowulf? What is your story with the text?

101 Greatest Books

I love to read. This fact served me well through my English degree and years of teaching. However, those of us who are bibliophiles, closet or otherwise, are always evaluating ourselves against our own personal reading list, our own internal library of texts.

Some well wishing person will ask, "Have you read _____________?" and if I could answer a confident "Yes" then my self esteem could stay intact for a few more moments of that day. But, if that person were to drop the name of a title I had not read or worst yet had never even heard of my world of novels, paper, and fine print would collapse around me in dust.

So to avoid these moments of doom I have taken two drastic measures.

1. I have washed my hands of anything written in the last 20 years. Don't judge me. There is just too much old stuff to read and time keeps marching on and I don't think to the betterment of literature available (with some very notable exceptions).

2. I have decided to read through the College Boards 101 Best Novel's List. I found there to be a shocking number of book lists floating out there in cyberspace. However, I respect College Board as the scholastic gatekeepers with their assessments such as the SAT, and Advance Placement Exams.

Here is the list: (In alphabetical order)
– Beowulf
Achebe, Chinua Things Fall Apart
Agee, James A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane Pride and Prejudice
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
Cooper, James Fenimore The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen The Red Badge of Courage
Dante Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles A Tale of Two Cities
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
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
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
Ibsen, Henrik A Doll’s House
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
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
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
Shakespeare, William Macbeth
Shakespeare, William A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William Romeo and Juliet
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
Thoreau, Henry David Walden
Tolstoy, Leo War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire Candide
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

To date I have 68 of the novels listed above. So I am rolling up my sleeves, getting the bookmarks ready, and finding a comfy chair to read the rest.

Have you read any of these novels? What are your thoughts on this list?