Reading Lists

Indiana Banned Books

Banned Books 2022

In January, I put together a list of books that various far-right protest groups in Indiana were trying to get banned from Indiana school systems in various towns (Carmel, Fort Wayne, Greenfield, Pendleton, Indianapolis). There are a lot of books that have either been challenged or soon will be – 148 titles and counting.

What these groups are doing is taking book titles compiled by a national organization as “inappropriate books” and searching online catalogs or sending people into school libraries or public libraries to see if those books are available. If they are, they report back to one of the local organizations to get a letter-writing campaign from people in that district to protest the books. They’re also sharing books in a couple of facebook groups to get disruptions going on in as many school systems as they can around the state.

The books are called “inappropriate” if they teach about racism, history of marginalized people, LGBTQA+ subjects, immigration, sex education, gun control, sexism… anything that would challenge white male hegemony.

It sounds like these same people are in connected to the legislation going through the statehouse as well – they’ve referenced it.

Some links where I gathered lists of books they are working on banning:

Sources:
Unify Carmel – How To Search For Inappropriate Books
Facebook page – Mary In the Library
Facebook page – Mama Bears in Carmel Clay Schools
Facebook page – Moms for Liberty – Hamilton County, IN (PUBLIC)

I put together a wishlist on IndyReads online store at bookshop.org if you are interested in helping me put some of these books in our little free library. I’ve been buying diverse books for the last couple of months, but I’d be happy to have more.

  • The 1619 Project: A New Origin Story – The New York Times Magazine, Caitlin Roper, et al.
  • The 1619 Project: Born on the Water – Nikole Hannah-Jones, Renée Watson, et al.
  • #Blacklivesmatter: Protesting Racism – Rachael L. Thomas
  • 10,000 Dresses – Marcus Ewert and Rex Ray
  • A Big Mooncake for Little Star – Grace Lin
  • A Good Kind of Trouble – Lisa Moore Ramée
  • A People’s History of the United States – Howard Zinn
  • A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches – Martin Luther King
  • A Young People’s History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror – Howard Zinn and Rebecca Stefoff
  • All Are Welcome – Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman
  • And Tango Makes Three – Peter Parnell, Justin Richardson, et al.
  • Antiracist Baby Board Book – Ibram X. Kendi and Ashley Lukashevsky
  • Ask a Queer Chick: A Guide to Sex, Love, and Life for Girls Who Dig Girls – Lindsay King-Miller
  • Ask Me How I Got Here – Christine Heppermann
  • Autoboyography – Christina Lauren
  • Back to School: Why Everyone Deserves a Second Chance at Education – Mike Rose
  • Backwards Day – S. Bear Bergman and Kd Diamond
  • Beautiful – Amy Reed
  • Berlin Boxing Club, the PB – Robert Sharenow
  • Between the World and Me – Ta-Nehisi Coates
  • Beyond the Gender Binary – Alok Vaid-Menon and Ashley Lukashevsky
  • Black Lives Matter at School: An Uprising for Educational Justice – Denisha Jones, Jesse Hagopian, et al.
  • Blankets: A Graphic Novel – Craig Thompson
  • Born Ready: The True Story of a Boy Named Penelope – Jodie Patterson and Charnelle Pinkney Barlow
  • Breathless – Jennifer Niven
  • Brick by Brick – Heidi Woodward Sheffield
  • Call Me Max – Kyle Lukoff
  • Call Me Tree / Llámame Árbol – Maya Christina Gonzalez
  • Calvin – Vanessa Ford, Jr. Ford, et al.
  • Cemetery Boys – Aiden Thomas
  • Count Me in – Varsha Bajaj
  • Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement – Kimberle Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, et al.
  • Dead End – Jason Myers
  • Dear Martin – Nic Stone
  • Dictionary for a Better World: Poems, Quotes, and Anecdotes from A to Z – Irene Latham, Charles Waters, et al.
  • Doing It – Hannah Witton
  • Don’t Hug Doug: (He Doesn’t Like It) – Carrie Finison and Daniel Wiseman
  • Don’t Touch My Hair! – Sharee Miller
  • Drama: A Graphic Novel – Raina Telgemeier
  • Dreamers – Yuyi Morales
  • Dreaming in Cuban – Cristina García
  • Dress Codes for Small Towns – Courtney Stevens
  • Exit Here. – Jason Myers
  • Full Disclosure – Camryn Garrett
  • Full, Full, Full of Love – Trish Cooke and Paul Howard
  • Gender Queer: A Memoir – Maia Kobabe
  • George (Scholastic Gold) – Alex Gino
  • Ghost Boys – Jewell Parker Rhodes
  • Graceling – Kristin Cashore
  • Hands Up! – Breanna J. McDaniel and Shane W. Evans
  • Homegoing – Yaa Gyasi
  • How to Be an Antiracist – Ibram X. Kendi
  • How We Fight White Supremacy: A Field Guide to Black Resistance – Akiba Solomon and Kenrya Rankin
  • I Am Enough – Grace Byers and Keturah A. Bobo
  • I Am Jazz – Jessica Herthel, Jazz Jennings, et al.
  • I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter – Erika L. Sánchez
  • I Am Rosa Parks – Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos
  • Introducing Teddy: A Gentle Story about Gender and Friendship – Jessica Walton and Dougal MacPherson
  • It’s Not the Stork!: A Book about Girls, Boys, Babies, Bodies, Families and Friends – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
  • It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, Gender, and Sexual Health – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
  • It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families – Robie H. Harris and Michael Emberley
  • Jack (Not Jackie) – Erica Silverman and Holly Hatam
  • Jacob’s New Dress – Sarah Hoffman, Ian Hoffman, et al.
  • Jamie Is Jamie: A Book about Being Yourself and Playing Your Way – Afsaneh Moradian and Maria Bogade
  • Jesus Land: A Memoir; With a New Preface by the Author – Julia Scheeres
  • Julián Is a Mermaid – Jessica Love
  • l8r, g8r – Lauren Myracle
  • Leah on the Offbeat – Becky Albertalli
  • Let’s Talk about Love – Claire Kann
  • Let’s Talk about Race – Julius Lester and Karen Barbour
  • Lexicon – Max Barry
  • Looking for Alaska – John Green
  • Making a Baby – Rachel Greener and Clare Owen
  • Malala: My Story of Standing Up for Girls’ Rights – Malala Yousafzai and Sarah J. Robbins
  • Marvin Redpost #3: Is He a Girl?
  • Max and the Talent Show – Kyle Lukoff and Luciano Lozano
  • Max on the Farm – Kyle Lukoff and Luciano Lozano
  • Me and Earl and the Dying Girl (Revised Edition) – Jesse Andrews
  • Me and White Supremacy: Combat Racism, Change the World, and Become a Good Ancestor – Layla Saad and Robin Diangelo
  • Morris Micklewhite and the Tangerine Dress – Christine Baldacchino and Isabelle Malenfant
  • My Princess Boy – Cheryl Kilodavis and Suzanne DeSimone
  • Nineteen Minutes – Jodi Picoult
  • Not My Idea: A Book about Whiteness – Anastasia Higginbotham
  • Nuestra Clase es una Familia – Shannon Olsen and Sandie Sonke
  • Odd One Out – Nic Stone
  • Oliver Button Is a Sissy – Tomie dePaola and Tomie dePaola
  • One of a Kind, Like Me / Único Como Yo – Laurin Mayeno and Robert Liu-Trujillo
  • One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus
  • One of Us Is Next: The Sequel to One of Us Is Lying – Karen M. McManus
  • Our Own Private Universe – Robin Talley
  • Out of Darkness – Ashley Hope Pérez
  • Perfectly Good White Boy – Carrie Mesrobian
  • Pink Is for Boys – Robb Pearlman and Eda Kaban
  • Pinky and Rex and the Bully: Ready-To-Read Level 3 – James Howe and Melissa Sweet
  • Pride: The Story of Harvey Milk and the Rainbow Flag – Rob Sanders and Steven Salerno
  • Red: A Crayon’s Story – Michael Hall
  • Rick – Alex Gino
  • Seeing Gender: An Illustrated Guide to Identity and Expression – Iris Gottlieb and Meredith Talusan
  • Separate Is Never Equal: Sylvia Mendez and Her Family’s Fight for Desegregation – Duncan Tonatiuh
  • Sex Is a Funny Word: A Book about Bodies, Feelings, and You – Cory Silverberg and Fiona Smyth
  • Sex: An Uncensored Introduction – Nikol Hasler and Michael Capozzola
  • Shades of People – Sheila M. Kelly and Shelley Rotner
  • Sissy: A Coming-Of-Gender Story – Jacob Tobia
  • So You Want to Talk about Race – Ijeoma Oluo
  • Sparkle Boy – Leslea Newman and Maria Mola
  • Speak – Laurie Halse Anderson
  • Stamped (for Kids): Racism, Antiracism, and You – Jason Reynolds, Ibram X. Kendi, et al.
  • Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You: A Remix of the National Book Award-Winning Stamped from the Beginning – Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi
  • Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom – Bell Hooks
  • The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian – Sherman Alexie
  • The Berlin Boxing Club – Robert Sharenow
  • The Boy in the Red Dress – Kristin Lambert
  • The Boy Who Wore a Dress – Ben Franks and Jarrod Becker
  • The Boys Body Book (Fifth Edition): Everything You Need to Know for Growing Up! (Puberty Guide, Health Education, Books for Growing Up) – Kelli Dunham, Steve Bjorkman, et al.
  • The Breakaways – Cathy G. Johnson
  • The Colors of Us – Karen Katz
  • The Day You Begin – Jacqueline Woodson and Rafael López
  • The Every Body Book: The LGBTQ+ Inclusive Guide for Kids about Sex, Gender, Bodies, and Families – Rachel E. Simon and Noah Grigni
  • The Gender Wheel: a story about bodies and gender for every body – Maya Christina Gonzalez
  • The Hate U Give – Angie Thomas and Nikki Giovanni
  • The Haters – Jesse Andrews
  • The Infinite Moment of Us – Lauren Myracle
  • The Matter of Black Lives: Writing from the New Yorker – Jelani Cobb and David Remnick
  • The New Queer Conscience – Adam Eli and Ashley Lukashevsky
  • The Other Boy – M. G. Hennessey and Sfe R. Monster
  • The Perks of Being a Wallflower – Stephen Chbosky
  • The Proudest Blue: A Story of Hijab and Family – Ibtihaj Muhammad, S. K. Ali, et al.
  • The Secret Loves of Geeks – Margaret Atwood, Gerard Way, et al.
  • The Sissy Duckling: Book and CD – Harvey Fierstein and Henry Cole
  • The Skin I’m in: A First Look at Racism – Pat Thomas and Lesley Harker
  • The Skin You Live in – Michael Tyler and David Lee Csicsko
  • The Story of Ruby Bridges – Robert Coles and George Ford
  • The Story of Ruby Bridges: A Biography Book for New Readers – Arlisha Norwood Alston
  • The Temptation of Adam – Dave Connis
  • They She He Me: Free to Be! – Maya Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Sg
  • They, She, He easy as ABC – Maya Christina Gonzalez and Matthew Sg
  • This Book Is Gay – Juno Dawson and David Levithan
  • This One Summer – Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki
  • Triangles – Ellen Hopkins
  • Troublemakers: Lessons in Freedom from Young Children at School – Carla Shalaby
  • Understanding Gender – Juno Dawson
  • Vampire Academy – Richelle Mead
  • What Girls Are Made of – Elana K. Arnold
  • When a Bully is President: Truth and Creativity for Oppressive Times – Maya Christina Gonzalez
  • When Aidan Became a Brother – Kyle Lukoff and Kaylani Juanita
  • Where Did I Come From?: An Illustrated Childrens Book on Human Sexuality – Peter Mayle
  • Who Has What?: All about Girls’ Bodies and Boys’ Bodies – Robie H. Harris and Nadine Bernard Westcott
Continue ReadingIndiana Banned Books

100 novels everyone should read – Telegraph

Another “books you should read” list, this time from the telegraph. The one’s I’ve read are crossed off. This is actually a pretty good list – mostly classics, and not a single Ayn Rand title on it.

Source: Telegraph “100 novels everyone should read”
The best novels of all time from Tolkien to Proust and Middlemarch

100 The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkein
WH Auden thought this tale of fantastic creatures looking for lost jewellery was a “masterpiece”.

99 To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
A child’s-eye view of racial prejudice and freaky neighbours in Thirties Alabama.

98 The Home and the World by Rabindranath Tagore
A rich Bengali noble lives happily until a radical revolutionary appears.

97 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Earth is demolished to make way for a Hyperspatial Express Route. Don’t panic.

96 One Thousand and One Nights Anon
A Persian king’s new bride tells tales to stall post-coital execution.

95 The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Werther loves Charlotte, but she’s already engaged. Woe is he!

94 Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
The children of poor Hindus and wealthy Muslims are switched at birth.

93 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy by John le Carré
Nursery rhyme provides the code names for British spies suspected of treason.

92 Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons
Hilarious satire on doom-laden rural romances. “Something nasty” has been observed in the woodshed.

91 The Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki
The life and loves of an emperor’s son. And the world’s first novel?

90 Under the Net by Iris Murdoch
A feckless writer has dealings with a canine movie star. Comedy and philosophy combined.

89 The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing
Lessing considers communism and women’s liberation in what Margaret Drabble calls “inner space fiction”.

88 Eugene Onegin by Alexander Pushkin
Passion, poetry and pistols in this verse novel of thwarted love.

87 On the Road by Jack Kerouac
Beat generation boys aim to “burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles”.

86 Old Goriot by Honoré de Balzac
A disillusioning dose of Bourbon Restoration realism. The anti-hero “Rastingnac” became a byword for ruthless social climbing.

85 The Red and the Black by Stendhal
Plebian hero struggles against the materialism and hypocrisy of French society with his “force d’ame”.

84 The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
“One for all and all for one”: the eponymous swashbucklers battle the mysterious Milady.

83 Germinal by Emile Zola
Written to “germinate” social change, Germinal unflinchingly documents the starvation of French miners.

82 The Stranger by Albert Camus
Frenchman kills an Arab friend in Algiers and accepts “the gentle indifference of the world”.

81The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Illuminating historical whodunnit set in a 14th-century Italian monastry.

80 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey
An Australian heiress bets an Anglican priest he can’t move a glass church 400km.

79 Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys
Prequel to Jane Eyre giving moving, human voice to the mad woman in the attic.

78 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
Carroll’s ludic logic makes it possible to believe six impossible things before breakfast.

77 Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
Yossarian feels a homicidal impulse to machine gun total strangers. Isn’t that crazy?

76 The Trial by Franz Kafka
K proclaims he’s innocent when unexpectedly arrested. But “innocent of what”?

75 Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee
Protagonist’s “first long secret drink of golden fire” is under a hay wagon.

74 Waiting for the Mahatma by RK Narayan
Gentle comedy in which a Gandhi-inspired Indian youth becomes an anti-British extremist.

73 All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Remarque
The horror of the Great War as seen by a teenage soldier.

72 Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant by Anne Tyler
Three siblings are differently affected by their parents’ unexplained separation.

71 The Dream of the Red Chamber by Cao Xueqin
Profound and panoramic insight into 18th-century Chinese society.

70 The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Garibaldi’s Redshirts sweep through Sicily, the “jackals” ousting the nobility, or “leopards”.

69 If On a Winter’s Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino
International book fraud is exposed in this playful postmodernist puzzle.

68 Crash by JG Ballard
Former TV scientist preaches “a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology”.

67 A Bend in the River by VS Naipaul
East African Indian Salim travels to the heart of Africa and finds “The world is what it is.”

66 Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Boy meets pawnbroker. Boy kills pawnbroker with an axe. Guilt, breakdown, Siberia, redemption.

65 Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
Romantic young doctor’s idealism is trampled by the atrocities of the Russian Revolution.

64 The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz
Follows three generations of Cairenes from the First World War to the coup of 1952.

63 The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Stevenson’s “bogey tale” came to him in a dream.

62 Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
Swift’s scribulous satire on travellers’ tall tales (the Lilliputian Court is really George I’s).

61 My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk
A painter is murdered in Istanbul in 1591. Unusually, we hear from the corpse.

60 One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Myth and reality melt magically together in this Colombian family saga.

59 London Fields by Martin Amis
A failed novelist steals a woman’s trashed diaries which reveal she’s plotting her own murder.

58 The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
Gang of South American poets travel the world, sleep around, challenge critics to duels.

57 The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
Intellectuals withdraw from life to play a game of musical and mathematical rules.

56 The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Madhouse memories of the Second World War. Key text of European magic realism.

55 Austerlitz by WG Sebald
Paragraph-less novel in which a Czech-born historian traces his own history back to the Holocaust.

54 Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Scholar’s sexual obsession with a prepubescent “nymphet” is complicated by her mother’s passion for him.

53 The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
After nuclear war has rendered most sterile, fertile women are enslaved for breeding.

52 The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger
Expelled from a “phony” prep school, adolescent anti-hero goes through a difficult phase.

51 Underworld by Don DeLillo
From baseball to nuclear waste, all late-20th-century American life is here.
READ: The best books of 2014

class=”checked”50 Beloved by Toni Morrison
Brutal, haunting, jazz-inflected journey down the darkest narrative rivers of American slavery.

49 The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
“Okies” set out from the Depression dustbowl seeking decent wages and dignity.

48 Go Tell It On the Mountain by James Baldwin
Explores the role of the Christian Church in Harlem’s African-American community.

47The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
A doctor’s infidelities distress his wife. But if life means nothing, it can’t matter.

46 The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
A meddling teacher is betrayed by a favourite pupil who becomes a nun.

45 The Voyeur by Alain Robbe-Grillet
Did the watch salesman kill the girl on the beach. If so, who heard?

44 Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre
A historian becomes increasingly sickened by his existence, but decides to muddle on.

43 The Rabbit books by John Updike
A former high school basketball star is unsatisfied by marriage, fatherhood and sales jobs.

42 The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
A boy and a runaway slave set sail on the Mississippi, away from Antebellum “sivilisation”.

41 The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
A drug addict chases a ghostly dog across the midnight moors.

40 The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Lily Bart craves luxury too much to marry for love. Scandal and sleeping pills ensue.

39 Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe
A Nigerian yam farmer’s local leadership is shaken by accidental death and a missionary’s arrival.

38The Great Gatsby by F Scott Fitzgerald
A mysterious millionaire’s love for a woman with “a voice full of money” gets him in trouble.

37 The Warden by Anthony Trollope
“Of all novelists in any country, Trollope best understands the role of money,” said W.H. Auden.

36 Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
An ex-convict struggles to become a force for good, but it ends badly.

35 Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis
An uncommitted history lecturer clashes with his pompous boss, gets drunk and gets the girl.

34 The Big Sleep by Raymond Chandler
“Dead men are heavier than broken hearts” in this hardboiled crime noir.

33 Clarissa by Samuel Richardson
Epistolary adventure whose heroine’s bodice is savagely unlaced by the brothel-keeping Robert Lovelace.

32 A Dance to the Music of Time by Anthony Powell
Twelve-book saga whose most celebrated character wears “the wrong kind of overcoat”.

31 Suite Francaise by Irène Némirovsky
Published 60 years after their author was gassed, these two novellas portray city and village life in Nazi-occupied France.

30 Atonement by Ian McEwan
Puts the “c” word in the classic English country house novel.

29 Life: a User’s Manual by Georges Perec
The jigsaw puzzle of lives in a Parisian apartment block. Plus empty rooms.

28 Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
Thigh-thwacking yarn of a foundling boy sewing his wild oats before marrying the girl next door.

27 Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
Human endeavours “to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world” have tragic consequences.

26 Cranford by Elizabeth Gaskell
Northern villagers turn their bonnets against the social changes accompanying the industrial revolution.

25 The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
Hailed by TS Eliot as “the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels”.

24 Ulysses by James Joyce
Modernist masterpiece reworking of Homer with humour. Contains one of the longest “sentences” in English literature: 4,391 words.

23 Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Buying the lies of romance novels leads a provincial doctor’s wife to an agonising end. For other Romantic books suggestions, you may click the link to see more.

22 A Passage to India by EM Forster
A false accusation exposes the racist oppression of British rule in India.

21 1984 by George Orwell
In which Big Brother is even more sinister than the TV series it inspired.

20 Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Samuel Johnson thought Sterne’s bawdy, experimental novel was too odd to last. Pah!

class=”checked”19 The War of the Worlds by HG Wells
Bloodsucking Martian invaders are wiped out by a dose of the sniffles.

18 Scoop by Evelyn Waugh
Waugh based the hapless junior reporter in this journalistic farce on former Telegraph editor Bill Deedes.

17 Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Sexual double standards are held up to the cold, Wessex light in this rural tragedy.

16 Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
A seaside sociopath mucks up murder and marriage in Greene’s literary Punch and Judy show.

15 The Code of the Woosters by PG Wodehouse
A scrape-prone toff and pals are suavely manipulated by his gentleman’s personal gentleman.

14 Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
Out on the winding, windy moors Cathy and Heathcliff become each other’s “souls”. Then he storms off.

13 David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
Debt and deception in Dickens’s semi-autobiographical Bildungsroman crammed with cads, creeps and capital fellows.

12 Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe
A slave trader is shipwrecked but finds God, and a native to convert, on a desert island.

11 Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Every proud posh boy deserves a prejudiced girl. And a stately pile.

10 Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Picaresque tale about quinquagenarian gent on a skinny horse tilting at windmills.

9 Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Septimus’s suicide doesn’t spoil our heroine’s stream-of-consciousness party.

8 Disgrace by JM Coetzee
An English professor in post-apartheid South Africa loses everything after seducing a student.

7 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Poor and obscure and plain as she is, Mr Rochester wants to marry her. Illegally.

6 In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Seven-volume meditation on memory, featuring literature’s most celebrated lemony cake.

5 Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
“The conquest of the earth,” said Conrad, “is not a pretty thing.”

4 The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
An American heiress in Europe “affronts her destiny” by marrying an adulterous egoist.

3 Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Tolstoy’s doomed adulteress grew from a daydream of “a bare exquisite aristocratic elbow”.

2 Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Monomaniacal Captain Ahab seeks vengeance on the white whale which ate his leg.

1 Middlemarch by George Eliot
“One of the few English novels written for grown-up people,” said Virginia Woolf.

Continue Reading100 novels everyone should read – Telegraph

Character lists in famous novels

Covers of Famous Novels

The characters in these lists are main characters and key secondary characters in these stories. In some cases there are additional secondary and minor characters not listed here. This list may be updated periodically with additional famous novels and their character lists.

The Great Gatsby Characters: 10
Nick Carraway
Jay Gatsby
Daisy Buchanan
Tom Buchanan
Jordan Baker
Myrtle Wilson
George Wilson
Owl Eyes
Klipspringer
Meyer Wolfsheim

Treasure Island Characters: 11
Jim Hawkins
Billy Bones
Black Dog
Squire Trelawney
Dr. Livesey
Captain Smollett
Long John Silver
Ben Gunn
Pew
Israel Hands
Tom Redruth

The Sun Also Rises Characters: 12
Jake Barnes
Lady Brett Ashley
Robert Cohn
Bill Gorton
Mike Campbell
Pedro Romero
Montoya
Frances Clyne
Count Mippipopolous
Wilson-Harris
Belmonte
Harvey Stone

Moby-Dick: or, The Whale Characters: 16
Ishmael
Ahab
Moby Dick
Starbuck
Queequeg
Stubb
Tashtego
Flask
Daggoo
Pip
Fedallah
Peleg
Bildad
Father Mapple
Captain Boomer
Gabriel

As I Lay Dying Characters: 16
Addie Bundren
Anse Bundren
Cash Bundren
Darl Bundren
Jewel Bundren
Dewey Dell Bundren
Vardaman Bundren
Vernon Tull
Cora Tull
Peabody
Lafe
Whitfield
Samson
MacGowan
Moseley
Armstid

To Kill a Mockingbird Characters: 18
Jean Louise “Scout” Finch
Atticus Finch
Jeremy Atticus “Jem” Finch
Arthur “Boo” Radley
Bob Ewell
Charles Baker “Dill” Harris
Miss Maudie Atkinson
Calpurnia
Aunt Alexandra
Mayella Ewell
Tom Robinson
Link Deas
Mrs. Henry Lafayette Dubose
Nathan Radley
Heck Tate
Mr. Dolphus Raymond
Mr. Walter Cunningham
Walter Cunningham

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Characters: 25
Huckleberry Finn
Tom Sawyer
Widow Douglas and Miss Watson
Jim
Pap (Huck’s Father)
The Duke and the King
Judge Thatcher
The Grangerford family – Bob, Buck, Charlotte, Col., Emmeline, Sophia, Tom
The Wilks family – Harvey, Joanna, Mary Jane, Peter, Susan, William
Silas and Sally Phelps
Aunt Polly

Anna Karenina Characters: 26
Anna Arkadyevna Karenina
Alexei Alexandrovich Karenin
Alexei Kirillovich Vronsky
Konstantin Dmitrich Levin
Ekaterina Alexandrovna Shcherbatskaya (Kitty)
Stepan Arkadyich Oblonsky (Stiva)
Darya Alexandrovna Oblonskaya (Dolly)
Sergei Alexeich Karenin (Seryozha)
Nikolai Dmitrich Levin
Sergei Ivanovich Koznyshev
Agafya Mikhailovna
Countess Vronsky
Alexander Kirillovich Vronsky
Varvara Vronsky
Prince Alexander Dmitrievich Shcherbatsky
Princess Shcherbatskaya
Countess Lydia Ivanovna
Elizaveta Fyodorovna Tverskaya (Betsy)
Marya Nikolaevna
Madame Stahl
Varvara Andreevna (Varenka)
Yashvin
Nikolai Ivanovich Sviyazhsky
Fyodor Vassilyevich Katavasov
Landau

War and Peace Characters: nearly 600 characters

Related Reading:
Book Magazine’s The 100 Best Characters in Fiction Since 1900
Book Magazine, now defunct, compiled a panel of 55 authors, literary agents, editors, and actors in 2002 to “rank the top one hundred characters in literature since 1900.”

Continue ReadingCharacter lists in famous novels

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps

Project Fill-in-the-Gaps created by Moonrat on her blog Editorial Ass: fill in the gaps in your reading lists of classics and contemporary fiction. Make a list of 100 titles, give yourself 5 years to complete reading the list, and give yourself 25% “accident forgiveness” – consider the task accomplished if you achieve 75 titles in the time span. I found this via some blog or other — and sent it to Stephanie, who loves these sorts of projects and immediately put together her list.
I have some rather heavy lifting on my list (Proust!!!!!!) so I have 65 76 titles, rather than 100.

Reading Deadline: April 10, 2014

* = I own the book
Italic = I’ve started it
strikethrough = I’ve finished it

  1. Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale *
  2. Ballard: Crash
  3. Samuel Butler: Way of All Flesh
  4. Celine: Death on the Installment Plan *
  5. Cervantes: Don Quixote *
  6. Chaucer: Canterbury Tales *
  7. Chopin: The Awakening *
  8. Clarke: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell *
  9. Collins: The Moonstone *
  10. Connolly: The Book of Lost Things *
  11. Conrad: The Secret Agent *
  12. Danielewski: House of Leaves *
  13. Dreiser: An American Tragedy
  14. Don DeLillo: Underworld *
  15. Elliot: Middlemarch *
  16. Ellison: Juneteenth *
  17. Gibson & Sterling: The Difference Engine
  18. Golden: Memoirs of a Geisha *
  19. Highsmith: The Talented Mr. Ripley *
  20. Hilton: Lost Horizon *
  21. Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go
  22. James: The Golden Bowl *
  23. James: The Portrait of a Lady *
  24. Jerome: Three Men in a Boat
  25. Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man *
  26. Lethem: Motherless Brooklyn *
  27. Lewis: Main Street
  28. Maugham: The Razor’s Edge *
  29. McCarty: The Road *
  30. McEwan: Atonement *
  31. Melville: Moby Dick *
  32. Moore: Fool
  33. Naipaul: A House for Mr. Biswas
  34. O’Connor: A Good Man is Hard To Find *
  35. Pasternak: Doctor Zhivago
  36. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 1) Swann’s Way *
  37. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 2) In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower *
  38. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 3) The Guermantes Way *
  39. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 4) Sodom and Gomorrah *
  40. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 5 & 6) The Prisoner & The Fugitive *
  41. Proust: (In Search of Lost Time – Vol 7) Finding Time Again *
  42. Rabelais: Gargantua and Pantagruel *
  43. Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea *
  44. Safran Foer: Everything is Illuminated *
  45. Steinbeck: Of Mice and Men *
  46. Stendhal: The Charterhouse of Parma *
  47. Sterne: A Sentimental Journey *
  48. Stephenson: Cryptonomicon *
  49. Gene Stratton Porter: A Girl of the Limber Lost *
  50. Donna Tartt: A Secret History *
  51. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina *
  52. Updike: TBD *
  53. Verne: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea *
  54. Wallace: Infinite Jest *
  55. Wharton: The House of Mirth *
  56. Wroblewski: The Story of Edgar Sawtelle *
  57. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road *
  58. Zusak: The Book Thief *
  59. Bloom: Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human *
  60. Bryson: A Short History of Nearly Everything *
  61. Campbell: The Hero of a Thousand Faces *
  62. Dawkins: The God Delusion *
  63. Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel *
  64. Diamond: Collapse *
  65. Jacobs: Life and Death of Cities *
  66. Jacobs: Economy of Cities *
  67. Jacobs: Nature of Economies *
  68. Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map *
  69. Pinker: The Blank Slate *
  70. Stein: The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas *
  71. Weisman: The World Without Us *
  72. Zimbardo: The Lucifer Effect *
  73. Burroughs: Queer *
  74. Dickinson: Complete Works
  75. Plath: The Bell Jar *
  76. Whitman: Leaves of Grass *
Continue ReadingProject Fill-in-the-Gaps

Book Meme: What I’ve Read

(via Publishing Careers)

The National Endowment for the Arts has an initiative you may have heard of called the Big Read. According to the website, its purpose is to “restore reading to the center of American culture.” They estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed.

Here’s what you do:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list on your own blog.

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 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte – loved this in high school, but don’t care for it now.
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden- (started this)
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville (started it)
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – A. S. Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

My score: 63/100

Continue ReadingBook Meme: What I’ve Read

links for 2008-01-25

Continue Readinglinks for 2008-01-25

Books I Got for Christmas 2007

Part of the awesome loot I got this holiday season from my family.

The Daring Book for Girls
by Andrea J. Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz

The Best of MAKE Magazine
by Mark Frauenfelder and Gareth Branwyn

Guerrilla Gardening: A Manualfesto
by David Tracey

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight, Volume 1: The Long Way Home
by Joss Whedon

Readymades: American Roadside Artifacts
by Jeff Brouws

Monopoly: The Story Behind the World’s Best-Selling Game
by Rod Kennedy

The Top Ten: Writers Pick Their Favorite Books
by J. Peder Zane

The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen
by Syrie James

Greetings from Jamaica, Wish You Were Queer
by Mari Sangiovanni

The Great American Road Trip
by Eric Peterson

Forbidden Knowledge: 101 Things Not Everyone Should Know How to Do
by Michael Powell

Far Out: 101 Strange Tales from Science’s Outer Edge
by Mark Pilkington

Magnum Magnum
by Brigitte Lardinois
A landmark book celebrating the engaging mix of photographer as both reporter and artist that has defined Magnum for sixty years. Magnum Magnum brings together the best work, celebrating the vision, imagination, and brilliance of Magnum photographers, both the acknowledged greats of photography in the twentieth century—among them Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Eve Arnold, Marc Riboud, and Werner Bischof—and the modern masters and rising stars of our time, such as Martin Parr, Susan Meiselas, Alec Soth, and Donovan Wylie. And it shows the work at a breathtaking scale: the vast page size of Magnum Magnum—12 by 15—gives the photos an impact never seen before in book form.

Continue ReadingBooks I Got for Christmas 2007

Georgette Heyer Novels and other Regency Historic Reading

Georgette Heyer Regency novels are some of my favorite guilty pleasures. I stumbled across Heyer when in junior high – which must have been about 1981 or so – and I was initially fascinated by the fact that several of her books had female characters that disguised themselves as men. At the time there were no gay teen novels like there are now, and cross-dressing female characters were one of my first identifications with my sexual orientation, so I scoured the library for books about tomboys and other gender-role breaking females.

But I kept reading Heyer long after I had read those particular books, because she wrote strong, amusing characters and entertaining plots that paid detailed attention to rules of polite society in upper-class England during the Regency period. I hadn’t yet discovered Jane Austen, but when I did, I recognized the world she lived in, because Heyer was obviously inspired by Austen’s novels, although Heyer’s work is quite a bit more comical.

Georgette Heyer, along with Jane Austen, inspired the whole sub-genre of Regency Romance, but her novels shouldn’t be confused with cheap paperbacks; Heyer did a tremendous amount of research on the Regency period of English history. Most of her novels were written in the 1920s through the 1970s – but their popularity has kept them in print fairly regularly since then, and many have been reprinted recently by modern romance publishers.

Continue ReadingGeorgette Heyer Novels and other Regency Historic Reading

Books that caught my eye

Stephanie and I went to the bookstore last night so she could use a gift certificate she received, and I wrote down a bunch of interesting books that I intend to either buy, check out from the library, or investigate further at some point in the future. Let me know if you’ve read any of them and if they’re worth picking up. Also, if any of them sound interesting for book club, throw those out, too.

Fiction

The Geographer’s Library by Jon Fasman
Metropolis: A Novel by Elizabeth Gaffney
The Final Solution: A Story of Detection by Michael Chabon
The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
Something Rotten (Thursday Next Novels) by Jasper Fforde
[I’ve read the rest in this very funny series, but haven’t gotten around to picking this one up yet.]
The Mercury Visions of Louis Daguerre: A Novel by Dominic Smith

Non-Fiction

Denison, Iowa: Searching for the Soul of America Through the Secrets of a Midwest Town by Dale Maharidge and Michael Williamson
We Know What You Want: How They Change Your Mind by Martin Howard
Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why by Bart Ehrman
Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community by Robert D. Putnam
How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered The World by Francis Wheen
Your Call Is Important to Us: The Truth About Bullshit by Laura Penny
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold
The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation’s Most Ordinary Citizen by Kevin O’Keefe
No Touch Monkey: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late by Ayun Halliday
I Hate Other People’s Kids by Adrianne Frost and Wilson Swain
[I’m putting this one on the list because of blogger Mike’s recent travails with the stroller set at the public library.]

Continue ReadingBooks that caught my eye