THE LIST

1. Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell

2. Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes

3. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy

4. Emma, Jane Austen

5. Moby Dick, Herman Melville

6. Walden, Henry David Thoreau

7. On Liberty, John Stuart Mill

8. A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens

9. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain

10. Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

11. The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald

12. The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot

13. To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf

14. The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner

15. Death in Venice, Thomas Mann

16. The Metamorphosis, Franz Kafka

17. Tess of the d’Urvervilles, Thomas Hardy

18. On the Road, Jack Kerouac

19. The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky

20. Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift

21. Tom Jones, Henry Fielding

22. Brave New World, Aldous Huxley

23. The Stranger, Albert Camus

24. For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway

25. Hamlet, William Shakespeare

26. Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte

27. The Federalist, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, John Jay

28. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

29. The Republic, Plato

30. The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer

31. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez

32. The Divine Comedy, Dante Aligheri

33. The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer

34. Das Kapital, Karl Marx

35. Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

36. Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather

37. The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

38. Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison

39. Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger

40. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder

41. To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

42. Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

43. Call of the Wild, Jack London

44. The Awakening, Kate Chopin

45. Frankenstein, Mary Shelley

46. The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne

47. Vanity Fair, William Makepeace Thackeray

48. Rights of Man, Thomas Paine

49. All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque

50. Les Miserables, Victor Hugo

51. Jurassic Park, Michael Chrichton

It's Official!

I have my list of 50 books to read! Well, technically I'm reading 53 books. My mom didn't consider Alice or Through the Looking Glass classics so those didn't make the list, but I'm still reading them! Also, my boyfriend insisted I add Michael Chrichton's Jurassic Park to my list. I guess we all have our own opinion on what should be deemed a classic.

So now I really have to get reading. I haven't made any more headway on Alice but I better get on it because my BFF Sarah (who is also reading it) and I have agreed to have both books finished by Wednesday so they can be discussed on our trip to Austin. This task will be especially hard because I just received free copies of both Vogue and Teen Vogue in today's mail and I still haven't finished the May issue of SELF! I guess it's time to set my priorities straight!

Caitlin in Wonderland

Recently, after patiently listening to me talking about drama with my friends and celebrity gossip, my boyfriend told me I never have anything intelligent to say anymore. The worst part is, I knew he was right. I graduated college last year and it's like since I've been out of school I've gotten a little stupider every day. A little less smart and a little more blonde. My sweet, caring, albeit harsh BBF (best boyfriend) suggested I get a hobby.

Until recently my list of hobbies included shopping, reading fashion magazines and lounging around watching TV while eating chips and salsa. Those who know me can vouch for this. But over the past few months I've been setting goals for myself. For example, I want to run a marathon in a few years. Right now I can only run about 2 miles straight but this is a vast improvement from the quarter mile I used to jog and then proceed to pass out in a panting, sweaty mess. So you can see I'm making progress. And when my boyfriend made me feel like a blithering idiot I decided I needed to make over not only my body, but also my mind.

So this is my new hobby. It's more of a challenge really. I am far from being well-read so I'm having my literary-buff mom compile a list of 50 classics that I should read. You know, those books that everyone is supposed to have read. As part of my assignment, I will blog about each novel, a nod back to all the book reports I wrote in high school. (Except this time around, I will actually read the books, not just the back covers.) I may not understand every book I read, and I'm sure it will take me years to get through the list, but I'm going to make it make it my business to complete this difficult task.

Number one on my lengthy list is Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll. I just saw the Tim Burton movie and since you can't walk through Barnes and Noble without running into a gazillion versions of the book, I thought it was a good one to start with. Well, I also thought it was an easy one to start with. I wish I had a better reason for choosing this novel to begin my challenge. I've been trying to think of an insightful way to compare my coping with post-grad syndrome to Alice being confused and lost in Wonderland but I couldn't - sorry!

My copy of the Alice also includes Through the Looking-Glass so it looks like I'll be knocking out two books pretty quickly. Hopefully, after doing some reading, I'll have something smarter to say in my next post. I'm currently on page 55 of the book and not really loving it...more to come!