Booking It!

I stumbled, bleary-eyed, to my coffeemaker this morning, thanking God for automatic timers. I’m not sure how I would function without that feature. I’m sure not away enough in the morning to actually MAKE coffee! My vision cleared as I sat at the sink sipping that first cup of ambrosia, gazing out the window into the backyard,  and I saw a brilliantly colored cardinel light on the edge of the bird bath. All way right with the world…or so I, in my ignorance, thought. I finished that first cup, then poured me another while my brain cleared enough so I could remember my schedule for that day.

Ah, yes. Today was the day I had set aside to spend with An Elegant Madness: High Society in Regency England by Venetia Murray, in preparation for the new book I was starting. It was a new reference book for me and I was looking forward to delving into it.

I walked into my office and stopped short–stunned. Nothing was the way it was the night before. Oh, yes, my desk was still there and my laptop, but where were the piles of books stacked on the ends of my desk? Pristine, virgin surfaces met my eye. My bookshelves, normally packed to overflowing were tastefully decorated with figurines.

I rushed through the house….not a book to be found anywhere.  I Googled the word “book”….and an error message came up “word not known.” Finally, I had to face the horrible truth… I had woken up in a world without books.

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Today’s Heads or Tails is brought to you by the letter “G”……. and what could be a better post for Booking It than “Good” Books? If you Google “good books” or “great books” there is a plethora of information out there. And, there is no true consensus on what makes a good or even great book.

However, The College Board has come up with a list. Just for entertainment, I’m going to put in bold the books I have read. I’d love to know which ones YOU have read.

– 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
Cather, Willa –Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey– The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton– The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate– The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph– Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore– The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen– The Red Badge of Courage
Dante– Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel –Don Quixote
Defoe, Daniel– Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles– A Tale of Two Cities
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor –Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick –Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Dreiser, Theodore– An American Tragedy
Dumas, –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
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
Homer– The Iliad
Homer– The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor– The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale –Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous –Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik –A Doll’s House
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
Kingston, Maxine Hong –The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper– To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair– Babbitt
London, Jack– The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas –The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García== One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman– Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman– Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur– The Crucible
Morrison, Toni –Beloved
O’Connor, Flannery –A Good Man is Hard to Find
O’Neill, Eugene– Long Day’s Journey into Night
Orwell, George– Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris– Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia– The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan– Selected Tales
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
Shakespeare, William– Hamlet
Shakespeare, William– Macbeth
Shakespeare, William– A Midsummer Night’s Dream
Shakespeare, William –Romeo and Juliet
Shaw, George Bernard– Pygmalion
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
Stowe, Harriet Beecher– Uncle Tom’s Cabin
Swift, Jonathan– Gulliver’s Travels
Thackeray, William –Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David –Walden
Tolstoy, Leo –War and Peace
Turgenev, Ivan– Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark– The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Voltaire– Candide
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr.– Slaughterhouse-Five
Walker, Alice– The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith –The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora –Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt– Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar –The Picture of Dorian Gray
Williams, Tennessee– The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia –To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard– Native Son