Out of Egypt:

So That's How Well Read I Am

Not as much as I wish. This list was borrowed from diber.

Careful kids, it's long.

After doing this, I'd like to see if there are any more, shall we say, authoritative lists to take on. I agree with those who said this one was heavy on American Lit.

Following convention, those I've read are in bold.

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 (The Plague also)
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop (I agree with Jeanette - My Antonia is more well-known, but this one was good as well.)
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales (as much of it as was in the Great Books of the Western World anthology)
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness (hated it for ideological reasons, as an earlier blog post made clear)
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans (may have read part of it)
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno (since I took a class in him, I've read the other parts of the Commedia as well)
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (read a few chapters as a kid - does that count?)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (started it)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment (also read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, The Gambler)
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 (scanned it in the CHOW book)
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 (also The Sun Also Rises, The Old Man and the Sea, some short stories)
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame (no, but I read parts of Les Miserables)
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House (no, but I did read "Hedda Gabler")
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 (also "The Trial")
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird (saw the movie)
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain (read the first section; the book is about as fun as staying at a tuberculosis colony for real - plus entire chapters are in French, untranslated; I did read "Death in Venice")
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude (I need to read this, in order to respect myself again)
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick (read in fourth grade, but didn't understand it)
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find (one of the few authors of whom I can say I've read all her fiction)
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm (also 1984, which is better)
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago (movie)
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar (I read one poem by her - "Daddy")
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (it depends how selective they are)
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 (read all his fiction, except "Seymour: An Introduction")
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream (in elementary school gifted class; adapted version)
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (my memory of it is vague)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion (it's on my list for the summer)
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 (long time ago)
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden (excerpts in CHOW, full work on my list)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace (started it, haven't finished yet)
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (long ago, can't remember if it was the full thing)
Voltaire - Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Slaughterhouse-Five (and some other Vonnegut, too)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass (some of the poems, though not a significant number)
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie (no, but I saw the movie of "A Streetcar Named Desire")
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse (yes, but I hated it)
Wright, Richard - Native Son

You didn't read _All Quiet..._ for Contemporary Global History??

Posted by: Jeannette at April 29, 2004 9:50 AM

No Walker Percy? No Walker Percy??! What kind of list doesn't have Walker Percy?

Posted by: mesh at April 29, 2004 11:27 AM

I didn't have contemporary global yet ,since I'm a sophomore...soon to be junior.

I dunno, Mesh. Even if it did, though, all I've read by him is Lost in the Cosmos. I saw The Thanatos Syndrome packaged as a cheap thriller once and considered picking it up. Next time I have cash, I will.

Posted by: Evan Donovan at April 29, 2004 1:10 PM

Thanatos Syndrome is amazing. It's my favorite of his novels. I noticed I've only read two of the non-bold books there, one being Remarque, which I just read this year. I'm surprised they picked Crime and Punishment over the other Dostoevsky novels. I didn't like it that much, but that mught be 'cuz the translation I used was unreadable.

Robertson Davies seriously needs to be on that list. Better than Faulkner in any event.

Posted by: Paul Baxter at April 29, 2004 5:39 PM

I saw my man Dickens on this list and I must encourage you, Evan, to read David Copperfield before you rock A Tale of Two Cities (and Wuthering Heights while you have the leisure time.)

Though the former is a quieter novel I must say that it was possibly, the most affective literary experience de mi vida (thus far.)

Posted by: Matt Serfass at April 30, 2004 2:07 AM

Sometimes you find interesting things by browsing about the archives of people's blogs. Anyway, I "stole" the AFI film list in your next entry and just wanted to ask in regard to this entry: why are theatre plays included in lists of works we are supposed to read. It's like including music scores in a reading list; plays are meant to be performed. The script is for those who may not have access to a performance. To say "I've read Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams" seems to miss something.

(And I completely agree with your analysis of My Fair Lady in the film entry. Same reasons why Phantom of the Opera bothers me, because it's really the same story stripped of the Enlightenment rationality and redressed in a Romantic guise.)

Posted by: funke at March 10, 2006 11:55 AM