NYT - 10 Best Books of 2007

[vicki]

Here's the NYT's list of the 10 Best Books of 2007 (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/10-best-2007.html?em&ex=1196571600&en=7373361a9601493b&ei=5087%0A).

I'm really not mad to read any of those fiction choices, but I'd love to read Little Heathens, which I've heard wonderful things about. And I'm also interested in reading The Nine and Imperial Life in the Emerald City.

[Kiyomi]

Lists like these make me feel like an inadequate bibliophile when I haven't even considered reading any of the books on the list.

[tangential1]

Have you seen the list "1001 books to read before you die"? I came across that a couple of months ago and was saddened by the fact that I'd only read 20 or so (and all of those the classics that I was forced to read in school!).

However, on closer examination I was rather put out by the list because so many authors had multiple entires. I know he is supposedly a very good author, but I can't believe that Ian McEwan warrants 10 books on the list! Really made me question the validity of the picks on that list and others.

[Kiyomi]

I took a look at the 1001 book list and have read 23 books. If you look below you'll see that most of the books I read were required reading in school at some point. Almost none of my favorite authors made an appearance and I have no desire to read most of the books on that list. It just goes to show that we should read what we like and enjoy reading not some stuffy accademics list ;-)

For School 19-
Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams
Contact by Carl Sagan
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Once and Future King, The by T. H. White
The Little Prince
Of Mice and Men (Penguin Great Books of the 20th Century) by John Steinbeck
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ulysses (Vintage International) by James Joyce
The Time Machine (Tor Classics) by H. G. Wells
Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Mark Twain Library) by Mark Twain
Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson
A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
The Hunchback of Notre Dame by Victor Hugo

Because I wanted to 4 books-
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (Oxford World's Classics) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien Boxed Set (The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings)
Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein

[vicki]

The 1001 list. (http://www.listology.com/content_show.cfm/content_id.22845/Books)

Those I've read:

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Tipping the Velvet – Sarah Waters
Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle – Haruki Murakami
Regeneration – Pat Barker
Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Cement Garden – Ian McEwan
The Shining – Stephen King
Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings – Maya Angelou
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
The Girls of Slender Means – Muriel Spark
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie – Muriel Spark
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
Rabbit, Run – John Updike
A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
The Old Man and the Sea – Ernest Hemingway
The End of the Affair – Graham Greene
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
The Plague – Albert Camus
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
For Whom the Bell Tolls – Ernest Hemingway
The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
Gone With the Wind – Margaret Mitchell
Murder Must Advertise – Dorothy L. Sayers
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
A Farewell to Arms – Ernest Hemingway
The Sound and the Fury – William Faulkner
Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
A Room With a View – E.M. Forster
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
The Awakening – Kate Chopin
The Island of Dr. Moreau – H.G. Wells
The Mayor of Casterbridge – Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Through the Looking Glass, and What Alice Found There – Lewis Carroll
War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
Silas Marner – George Eliot
Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lonely – Harriet Beecher Stowe
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
Le Père Goriot – Honoré de Balzac
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen





I noticed this one on there, which is a future VBC selection:

Testament of Youth – Vera Brittain

[Kiyomi]

Good for you Vicki! You look so diverse in your reading from that list!

[parcourir]

Hmm, my list of "have read" looks a lot like yours, Vicki - only shorter!

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
Middlesex – Jeffrey Eugenides
The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
The Poisonwood Bible – Barbara Kingsolver
The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco
The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
The Lover – Marguerite Duras
The Unbearable Lightness of Being – Milan Kundera
The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco
Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Flies – William Golding
The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
Animal Farm – George Orwell
The Little Prince – Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Passage to India – E.M. Forster
Siddhartha – Herman Hesse
Night and Day – Virginia Woolf
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
The Hound of the Baskervilles – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Kim – Rudyard Kipling
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – Mark Twain
Around the World in Eighty Days – Jules Verne
The Moonstone – Wilkie Collins
Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
The House of the Seven Gables – Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby-Dick – Herman Melville
The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
The Count of Monte-Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
Persuasion – Jane Austen
Emma – Jane Austen
Mansfield Park – Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen

The "1001" list is biased in more than a few ways, of course, but I will admit that all the books I've read from it were quite good.

[vicki]

That's a good mix, par! I see several on your list that I'd like to read--Middlesex, The Poisonwood Bible, The Count of Monte Cristo, the Atwoods that I haven't read

Oh, I left off Curious Dog--that was an excellent book! <edit post above to add> That is the only book from the 2000s that I've read.

I was glad to see some genre books on the list, including a couple of Lord Peter Wimsey books! Woohoo Lord P.! I'd only read one of them, however, because I'm saving The Nine Tailors for a rainy day. It's nice to know that I've got one Wimsey still left to read. :)

I'd say that many of the books I've read from the list were excellent, but some of them were grinding reads that I never would have picked up, much less finished, if they hadn't been assigned for school. Siddhartha would be pretty high up on that list. I'm not much into navel-gazing, which is the main thing I recall going on in that book. A good number of the books I read for high school English would go into that category, too. But maybe they'd hit me differently now that I've got a couple of extra decades and some change under my belt.

[tangential1]

The "1001" list is biased in more than a few ways, of course, but I will admit that all the books I've read from it were quite good.

Oh gosh, yes. A friend of mine created an Excel version of the list so we could sort it and I found that there are a whole bunch of authors with multiple books: 17 authors with 5 books each, 8 authors with 6 books each, and 7 authors that have 7 books each. Authors with more than 7 books on the list include:

J.M. Coetzee (10)
Charles Dickens (10)
Virginia Woolf (9)
Samuel Beckett (8)
Graham Greene (8)
Ian McEwan (8)

And interesting statistics about those:
(6) white
(5) male, (1) female
(4) English, (1) South African, (1) Irish
born 1812, 1882, 1904, 1906, 1940, 1948
and listed among each other's influences

[parcourir]

I'd say that many of the books I've read from the list were excellent, but some of them were grinding reads that I never would have picked up, much less finished, if they hadn't been assigned for school.

I should modify my "excellent" comment: Some really were excellent - fun to read, good writing, and made you think. Some, I agree, are quite something to push through. (There are a number of books on the 1001 list that I started and never managed to finish.) However, they all left me with something to mull over at the end, and there are a few on that list I would like to read again now that I'm older simply to see if I don't get more out of it.

[Bachi]

It turned out I read more of these than I thought. Read-51; Partially Read 6, and 16 more I have but haven’t read yet. A book club I was in made sure to include one classic selection each quarter and that was a good incentive. Some comments on a few I read recently

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: It is a shame just about nobody alive could read it and enjoy the original impact it was written to convey.

Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley: This one is worth reading, to my knowledge no movie reproduction got it right. Why, I can’t figure it’s a heck of a story as written.

Siddhartha – Herman Hesse:

Siddhartha ...I'm not much into navel-gazing, which is the main thing I recall going on in that book.

I didn't get that take when I read it recently, I had read parts of it along with other works of Herman Hesse' when I was on the fringe of the hippy days, and I didn't remember it much. There is a good chunk covering the diversion of his 'enlightened path' while he fell in love (perhaps explicity at times- I tend to tone down those parts in my mind) with an experienced madam (of course that’s not the correct terminology for the location and period of time.

[tangential1]

A book club I was in made sure to include one classic selection each quarter and that was a good incentive.

I really like that idea:) I've been wanting to get more acquainted with the classics.