03.15.00
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(everything i like to read, in no particular order.)

it's often been said that i'll read anything once, but this isn't that list...

this is a list of books that stay on my shelves, year after year. the books that get loaned out and disappear time and again. books that are just so darned impressive that i listed them right away, before the shine wore thin.

it's pretty varied, so expect anything from bad science fiction to really strange poetry, steven-king horror, achingly long classics and anything in between. some of it is popular pulp, some of it is what my english professors would have called 'the good stuff'.

anyone who ever taught me in an english class, i hope you're at least rewarded to see something you love reflected here. except you, Elaine Forehand, or that bitch grad student who taught that awful survey course where she made us reinterpret Huck Finn. I set that book on fire after your class, you hussy. I hope you're happy.

and, oh, while i have the chance, judi darling... if you're wandering around out there... i just want to get to say that you rocked my world. more books existed than i ever thought possible, and i really *can* write something interesting!

and just so i don't go an entire rant withouth at least some bile:

each listing should (or will soon) have a brief description of why i liked the book. unlike the countless "i'm literary" poseurs out there, i've actually read everything listed here. (you know who you are, you loser.)

S. John Updike
A book often contrasted with Nathanial Hawthorne, S. is my favorite Updike, better even than the stuff about the bunnies... ; ) A coming-to-one's-senses story -- sort of.
Ender's Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind
Orson Scott Card
What's stranger than these novels (which are plenty strange taken on their own) is the fact that what I get out of them in terms of moral and social messages is completely opposite to what the author actually intended. (How I know what he intended is twofold --(1) I've read some interviews with him in which I assume he was answering honestly and (2) a friend of mine grew up with his son, and has asked him those very questions.) So I suppose that makes my opinion of what these books mean rather suspect.
1984 George Orwell
Something to read, if you want to understand most of the disaffected humour in the world.
Brave New World
Brave New World Revisited
Aldous Huxley
The Scarlet Letter Nathanial Hawthorne
Mists of Avalon
The Forest House
The Inheritor
Marion Zimmer Bradley
The Tiger and Del Novels Jennifer Roberson
The Stand
any of his short stories
Steven King
The Hobbit
The Trilogy
J.R.R. Tolkien
Heading West
(or anything else)
Doris Betts
The Yellow Wallpaper Charlotte Gilman-Perkins
Hills Like White Elephants Ernest Hemingway
Lord of the Flies William Golding
Fahrenheit 451 Ray Bradbury
Uncle Remus Stories my dad.
King Lear William Shakespeare
Neverwhere
any Sandman
Neil Gaiman
A Swiftly Tilting Planet
A Wind in the Door
A Wrinkle in Time
Many Waters
Madeline L'Engle
A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. LeGuin
The Wasteland T.S. Eliot
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