Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created by The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because they are particularly fond of lists over at The Broke and the Bookish. I'm sure they'd love to share your lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten list.
1. Lolita - Nabakov - I've only read half of Lolita. I really wanted to finish it, but it got to the point where I was falling asleep halfway through sentences and wishing horrible deaths upon all of the characters. At that point I decided it was better to put Lolita down than continue down a road that might result in me setting fire to a perfectly harmless book. I tend to tell people I've read Lolita (I did sparknotes the ending) and sometimes count when I'm doing one of those weird facebook "which classics have you read" lists. I guess Nabakov just isn't for me.
2. The Boy Next Door and other chick lit books - Meg Cabot - These are my summer guilty pleasure books, but they're about as close as I'll ever get to reading romance novels. 8th grade a girl use to make fun of me for reading books like this and I guess the I still feels there is a certain stigma attached to them. It doesn't stop me from going back and rereading them every few summers but I do make sure to do it in the privacy of my own backyard.
3. Anna Karenina - Tolstoy - If I tell you a secret promise you won't be disappointed in me? I've never finished a Tolstoy novel. The seconds I've read I've really liked and I have every intention of actually reading Anna Karenina one day. This list isn't great proof of it, but I tend to really like Russian writers and people seem to just assume I've got War & Peace and this memorized or something. I don't. Sorry.
4. The Majority of Things Written by Hemingway - I liked A Farewell to Arms and I finished (with effort) For Whom the Bell Tolls but that's it. Nothing else. I had a mild Hemingway obsession in high school but it was more of a "wow, that man's kind of a bad ass" obsession and not a "I MUST READ ALL OF THE WORDS HE'S EVER WRITTEN RIGHT THIS SECOND" obsession. People couldn't really tell the difference, though.
5. As I Lay Dying - Faulkner - I was suppose to read this for a class two semesters ago. I got 90 pages in before I just couldn't take it anymore. I took a quick look at the spark notes page and then promptly wrote a five page paper on it anyway.
6. Hard Times - Dickens - Another book I was suppose to read for a class. I wanted to like Hard Times because I liked the rest of the books in my 19th century British Lit class and figured my awesome teacher could make me appreciate Dickens when no one else could. He couldn't. I never finished this book and sat quietly through most of the discussions. It's probably the closest I've come to finishing a work by Dickens though.
1 comment:
+JMJ+
I think the stigma attached to Chick Lit is surpassed only by that attached to Romance--which is what I read. (LOL!) Even comic books seem to get more respect. =/ Is this an anti-girl thing?
Your experience with Dickens reminds me of a similar one of my own. I had to read Great Expectations, which was okay for a while, but really bogged down for me halfway through. Since I was reading it for class, I hoped my professor would make it seem interesting and give me the motivator I needed to finish it. But then he got word that his father was dying, so he flew back home for a couple of weeks and another lecturer (one who wasn't so passionate about Dickens) took over his class in the meantime. But whenever I feel robbed of the Dickens lectures, I start feeling really bad for implying that he should have "made up" for the time he needed to be home with his father. =(
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