Finished Winesburg, Ohio yesterday evening. A respected professor had recommended this book to me many years ago and I failed to see anything in it then. I see quite a bit in it now. Must look at some other Anderson work now. And look at other works from the same time to see it in its context as a work of art and cultural commentary. Am thinking Lewis Main Street and Sister Carrie would be good choices.

from Philip D. Beidler, Scriptures for a Generation: What we were reading in the Sixties. U GA Press, 1994, 0-8203-1787-x

Alpert, Richard (pseud. Baba Ram Dass)
Be Here Now, Remember
Anonymous
Go Ask Alice
Baldwin, James
The Fire Next Time
Blake, William
Poetry
Boston Women's Health Book Collective
Our Bodies, Ourselves
Brautigan, Richard
Trout Fishing in America
Brown, Claud
Manchild in the Promised Land
Brown, Dee
Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee
Brown, Helen Gurley
Sex and the Single Girl
Brown, Norman O.
Life Against Death
Carson, Rachel
Silent Spring
Castaneda, Carlos
The Teachings of Don Juan
Cleaver, Eldridge
Soul on Ice
Dillard, Annie
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
Fanon, Frantz
The Wretched of the Earth
Farina, Richard
Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence
Coney Island of the Mind
Friedan, Betty
The Feminine Mystique
Gibran, Kahlil
The Prophet
Ginsberg, Allen
Howl and other Poems
Golding, William
Lord of the Flies
Greenberg, Joanne (pseud. Hannah Green)
I Never Promised you a Rose Garden
Greer, Germaine
The Female Eunuch
Heinlein, Robert
Stranger in a Strange Land
Heller, Joseph
Catch-22
Herr, Michael
Dispatches
Hesse, Hermann
Steppenwolf
Hoffman, Abbie
Revolution for the Hell of It
Kerouac, Jack
On the Road
Kesey, Ken
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
King, Martin Luther, Jr.
"Letter from the Birmingham Jail"
Knowles, John
A Separate Peace
Kunen, James S.
The Strawberry Statement
Laing, R. D.
The Politics of Experience
Leary, Timothy
The Psychedelic Experience
Mailer, Norman
Armies of the Night
Malcolm X
Autobiography of Malcolm X
Marcuse, Herbert
One Dimensional Man
Millett, Kate
Sexual Politics
Mills, C. Wright
The Power Elite
Morgan, Robin, ed.
Sisterhood is Powerful
Pirsig, Robert
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
Plath, Sylvia
The Bell Jar
Portola Institute
The Last Whole Earth Catalog
Pynchon, Thomas
The Crying of Lot 49
Reich, Charles
The Greening of America
Rubin, Jerry
Do It!
Salinger, J. D.
The Catcher in the Rye
Skinner, B. F.
Walden Two
Spock, Benjamin
Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care
Thompson, Hunter S.
Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail
Thoreau, Henry David
"Civil Disobedience"
Tolkien, J. R. R.
The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy
Vonnegut, Kurt
Slaughterhouse-Five
Watts, Alan
The Way of Zen
Webb, Charles
The Graduate
Wolfe, Tom
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
also
Roszak, Theodore
The Making of a Counter-Culture

How many of you read some of these in junior high and high schools back in the sixties and seventies and perhaps even in college? interesting to look back and see how much influence such texts thought to be so important at the time have had on our lives. Wolfe, Pynchon, Heller were all significant influences on me.

Bolds are ones that I read. Also Camus' The Stranger and the Myth of Sisyphus. How odd to recall them after such a long time. Guess they made an impression!

A meme from Reassigned Time:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the next 4 sentences on your blog along with these instructions.
5. Don't you dare dig for that "cool" or "intellectual" book in your closet! I know you were thinking about it! Just pick up whatever is closest.

3. Fifth Sentence: To proceed.
4. Next 4 sentences: BOOK 1. Folio, Chapter IV. (Hump Back). - This whale is often seen on the northern American coast. He has been frequently captured there, and towed into harbor. He has a great pack on him like a peddler; or you might call him the Elephant and Castle whale.

This list was inspired by a post on A Work in Progress:

The bolded books are the ones I have read. I have put asterisks by the ones that are on my Thursday Thirteen list to read in 2007.

1. Don Quixote - Miguel De Cervantes
2. Pilgrim's Progress - John Bunyan
3. Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
4. Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
5. Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
6. Clarissa - Samuel Richardson
7. Tristram Shandy - Laurence Sterne
8. Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos
9. Emma - Jane Austen
10. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
11. Nightmare Abbey - Thomas Love Peacock
12. The Black Sheep - Honore De Balzac
13. The Charterhouse of Parma - Stendhal
14. The Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
15. Sybil - Benjamin Disraeli
16. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens*
17. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
18. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
19. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
20. The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
21. Moby-Dick Herman Melville
22. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert*
23. The Woman in White -Wilkie Collins
24. Alice's Adventures In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
25. Little Women - Louisa M. Alcott
26. The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope*
27. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy*
28. Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
29. The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
30. The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
31. Huckleberry Finn - Mark Twain
32. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson
33. Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome
34. The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
35. The Diary of a Nobody - George Grossmith
36. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
37. The Riddle of the Sands - Erskine Childers
38. The Call of the Wild - Jack London
39. Nostromo - Joseph Conrad*
40. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
41. In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust
42. The Rainbow - D. H. Lawrence
43. The Good Soldier - Ford Madox Ford
44. The Thirty-Nine Steps - John Buchan
45. Ulysses - James Joyce
46. Mrs Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
47. A Passage to India - E. M. Forster *
48. The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
49. The Trial - Franz Kafka
50. Men Without Women - Ernest Hemingway
51. Journey to the End of the Night Louis - Ferdinand Celine
52. As I Lay Dying - William Faulkner
53. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
54. Scoop - Evelyn Waugh
55. USA - John Dos Passos
56. The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
57. The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford
58. The Plague - Albert Camus
59. Nineteen Eighty-Four - George Orwell
60. Malone Dies - Samuel Beckett
61. Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
62. Wise Blood - Flannery O'Connor
63. Charlotte's Web - E. B. White
64. The Lord Of The Rings J. R. R. Tolkien
65. Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
66. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
67. The Quiet American - Graham Greene
68 On the Road - Jack Kerouac
69. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
70. The Tin Drum - Gunter Grass
71. Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
72. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
73. To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
74. Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
75. Herzog - Saul Bellow
76. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
77. Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont - Elizabeth Taylor
78. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy - John Le Carre
79. Song of Solomon - Toni Morrison
80. The Bottle Factory Outing - Beryl Bainbridge
81. The Executioner's Song - Norman Mailer
82. If on a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino
83. A Bend in the River - V. S. Naipaul
84. Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee
85. Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
86. Lanark - Alasdair Gray
87. The New York Trilogy - Paul Auster
88. The BFG - Roald Dahl
89. The Periodic Table - Primo Levi
90. Money - Martin Amis
91. An Artist of the Floating World - Kazuo Ishiguro
92. Oscar And Lucinda - Peter Carey
93. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting - Milan Kundera
94. Haroun and the Sea af Stories - Salman Rushdie
95. La Confidential - James Ellroy
96. Wise Children Angela Carter
97. Atonement - Ian McEwan
98. Northern Lights - Philip Pullman
99. American Pastoral - Philip Roth
100. Austerlitz - W. G. Sebald

A late Thursday Thirteen to read in 2007:

Villette – Charlotte Bronte
Romola – George Eliot
Henry Esmond – Thackeray
Story of an African Farm – Olive Schreiner
Nostromo – Joseph Conrad
David Copperfield – Dickens
Buddenbrooks – Mann
Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
New Grub Street – Gissing
The Way We Live Now – Trollope
Pamela – Richardson
Madame Bovary – Flaubert
Tender is the Night – Fitzgerald

Another book finished last week:
Betty Fussell, My Kitchen Wars.

Books read in 2006

17. Island of Dr. Moreau - Wells
16. War and Peace - Tolstoy
15. Three Sisters - Chekhov
14. Desiree - Selinko
13. Rebecca's Tale - Beauman
12. The False Inspector Dew - Lovesey
11. The Night Watch - Waters
10. The Leopard - di Lampedusa
9. Bleak House - Dickens
8. The Master - Toibin
7. Author! Author! - Lodge
6. The Deadly Embrace - Mrazek
5. Middlemarch - Eliot
4. The Voyage Out - Woolf
3. The Light Years - Howard
2. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - Rowling (reread)
1. Phineas Finn - Trollope

and while there may not be as many as I would like, some few are weighty ones!

I finally did it! I have a blog now! I have only been threatening to do this for a couple of years now. But in order to respond to a post on another blog, I must be a blogger. Therefore I am. More to follow!