Newsweek's 50 Books for Our Times & Top 100 Books

List Junky Alert: A friend just told me about these Newsweek reading lists. I've only superficially perused them so far, and I'm particularly interested in the "50 Books For Our Times" list. I'll be taking a closer look later, but for others who hadn't seen them, here are links:

Newsweek's 50 Books For Our Times

Newsweek's Top 100 Books: The Meta-List

BEOWULF ON THE BEACH

by Jack Murnighan




We list junkies adore books like this, and this one is brand-spankin' new! For each of the 50 classics that Jack Murnighan has chosen to highlight in Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits, he "reveals how to get the most out of your reading and provides a crib sheet that includes the Buzz, the Best Line, What's Sexy, and What To Skip" (from the back cover). He tells you the boring parts to skip! Cool! I personally wouldn't do that, but it's nice that he lets me know what's not so good, at least in his opinion.

I've thumbed through the entire book, read sections here and there, and Murnighan makes me want to sit down and read each and every one of the books he talks about. So what's a girl to do but list them all out and get to work! It will be a long-term project of course, but eventually I'd like to have each one not only read, but I'd like to have a post written about each one, with the possible exception of The Bible. (I think I'd feel too weird "reviewing" the Bible.) That means a few rereads somewhere a long the way. And that's OK! Man, I love this stuff!!!

Books in bold I have read, but they are not talked about on this blog. Yet. :-) Books I've posted about are linked.

In chronological order:

The Iliad -- Homer
The Odyssey -- Homer
The Old Testament -- The Bible
The New Testament -- The Bible
The Aeneid -- Virgil
Metamorphoses -- Ovid
Beowulf -- Anonymous
Inferno -- Dante Alighieri
Paradiso -- Dante Aligheiri
The Decameron -- Giovanni Boccaccio
The Canterbury Tales -- Geoffrey Chaucer
The Faerie Queene -- Edmund Spencer
Hamlet -- William Shakespeare
King Lear -- William Shakespeare
Macbeth -- William Shakespeare
Don Quixote -- Miguel De Cervantes
Paradise Lost -- John Milton
Tom Jones -- Henry Fielding
Faust I & II -- Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
Eugene Onegin -- Alexander Pushkin
Pere Goriot -- Honore De Balzac
Jane Eyre -- Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights -- Emily Bronte
Moby Dick -- Herman Melville
Bleak House -- Charles Dickens
Great Expectations -- Charles Dickens
Madame Bovary -- Gustave Flaubert
Crime and Punishment -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Brothers Karamazov -- Fyodor Dostoevsky
War and Peace -- Leo Tolstoy
Anna Karenina -- Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch -- George Eliot
The Wings of the Dove -- Henry James
Remembrance of Things Past -- Marcel Proust
(My thoughts on Swann's Way)
Ulysses -- James Joyce
The Magic Mountain -- Thomas Mann
The Trial -- Franz Kafka
To The Lighthouse -- Virginia Woolf
The Sound and the Fury -- William Faulkner
A Farewell To Arms -- Ernest Hemingway
Tropic of Cancer -- Henry Miller
Native Son -- Richard Wright
The Man Without Qualities -- Robert Musil
Lolita -- Vladimir Nabokov
Giovanni's Room -- James Baldwin
One Hundred Years of Solitude -- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Gravity's Rainbow -- Thomas Pynchon
Blood Meridian -- Cormac McCarthy
Beloved -- Toni Morrison

Chuck Palahniuk

I am fascinated by Chuck Palahniuk's ability to take characters and circumstances that I would normally abhor and turn them into something humorous and sympathetic despite my disgust. In an effort to discover what it is about his lovable losers that keeps me wanting to go back for more, I am going to be reading all his novels. This is my list to keep track of my progress:

Fight Club
Survivor
Invisible Monsters
Choke
Lullaby
Diary
Haunted
Rant
Snuff
Pygmy

The ones I've read will be linked to my post about the book. I won't be getting to the whole list immediately, but I'll be picking away at it between everything else.

"Purple" Books

Between the upcoming presidential election and my recent reading of The Post-American World, I have found myself becoming obsessed with the desire to learn more about politics, economics, foreign affairs, etc. My problem is that even though I'm an Obama supporter, I don't necessarily want to read only the Democratic side of any topic. Nor am I interested in reading an Obama/Democrat slam-fest. With the bewildering array of political and current events books out there, I wondered where I could find more books like The Post-American World that don't obviously side with either party. Amazon has apparently heard my silent plea! From their Election Store:

Since not every political book is a red or a blue book, we've also prepared a list of "purple" books that includes journalistic accounts that present themselves as nonpartisan (even though they might be more critical of one party or another), as well as books that cross the usual party lines (even if they might be written by a member of one party or another).

Hooray!! Here is a link to that list: Purple Books List

Agree or disagree with the list as we will, it at least gives me a starting point. I'm off to the store with my list. . .