A New Direction

So, after thinking about my blog, I've decided that I want to take it in a different direction. I mean, not that I don't love thinking about random words and phrases and their etymology, but I feel that I need more structure. It's very difficult to come up with something applicable for every post that is still entertaining. Granted, there is no need for this to be entertaining for anyone, however, at least in this way someone can relate to what I am writing.

The factor of human relation is what brought me to this current idea: a blog is composed for the masses, with no guarantee of actually being read. Many great authors have written a story they need to tell, and received very little recognition until some duration after their manuscript's publication. After a writer becomes well known, he or she garners a following or a fan club. I would like to connect to those fan people while simultanously paying homage to great writers and great stories before me. I've compiled a list of things that I think every "well read" individual should read. My plan is to get through at least one a week of these texts, and post as I'm going along (although I am sure that deadline will change a little bit when school starts and I have to do class reading). This will give me structure, and something to follow along with.

This list is just books I've seen through my studies in English; I've read a lot of these, I just want to revist a few that I deem truly important here and there. (Granted, I have my favorite books that I can't live without; I have read Gone With the Wind, The Great Gatsby, and Inkheart each at least 13 times over, but you will notice those aren't on there. I want to revisit with a fresh, fresh mind). Also, I'm going to randomize my text selections so I don't end up only finishing the first half of the alphabet (thank you, random letter generator: http://www.dave-reed.com/Nifty/randSeq.html). 

So, it looks like next week's letter is G, so the first author with last name of g is Golding with Lord of the Flies. I had to read this book for freshman honors english back in high school, and after lending it to my brother, and my brother's friends, and the kids I've tutored, my copy is pretty trashed and annotated (not the same! Annotation is far superior to trash, I'm just reffering to the condition of the physical book). 

As I've said, my first post on Lord of the Flies will be next week... I'm trying to finish Atlas Shrugged (again). So, happy reading bloggers... read along with me if you like! Here's my collaboration: feel free to comment and add texts if you would like!

Achebe, Chinua. Things Fall Apart.
Agee, James. A Death in the Family.
Angelou, Maya. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
Anonymous. Beowulf.
Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice.
Baldwin, James. Go Tell It on the Mountain.
Bolt, Robert. A Man for All Seasons.
Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre.
Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights.
Buck, Pearl. The Good Earth.
Camus, Albert. The Stranger.
Cather, Willa. My Ántonia.
Cervantes, Miguel de. Don Quixote.
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales.
Chekhov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard.
Collins, Wilkie. The Moonstone.
Conrad, Joseph. Lord Jim.
Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage.
Dante. The Divine Comedy.
Defoe, Daniel. Moll Flanders.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations.
Dickinson, Emily. Poems.
Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment.
Dreiser, Theodore. An American Tragedy.
Eliot, George. Silas Marner.
Eliot, T.S. Murder in the Cathedral.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible Man.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays.
Faulkner, William. The Sound and the Fury.
Fielding, Henry. Tom Jones.
Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby.
Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary.
Forster, E.M. A Passage to India.
Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. (12/13/2009)
Goldsmith, Oliver. She Stoops to Conquer.
Graves, Robert. I, Claudius.
Greene, Graham. The Power and the Glory.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D'Urbervilles.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter.
Hemingway, Ernest. For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Henry, O. Stories ("The Gift of the Magi," "The Ransom of Red Chief," etc.).
Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf.
Homer. The Iliad.
---. The Odyssey.
Hughes, Langston. Poems.
Hugo, Victor. Les Misérables.
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God.
Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World.
Ibsen, Henrik. A Doll's House.
James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Kafka, Franz. The Trial.
Keats, John. Poems.
Kennedy, John F. Profiles in Courage.
Koestler, Arthur. Darkness at Noon.
Lawrence, D.H. Sons and Lovers.
Lawrence, Jerome and Robert E. Lee. Inherit the Wind.
Lee, Harper. To Kill a Mockingbird.
Lewis, Sinclair. Babbitt.
Llewellyn, Richard. How Green Was My Valley.
Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain.
Marlowe, Christopher. Dr. Faustus.
Maugham, W. Somerset. Of Human Bondage.
McCullers, Carson. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter.
Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick.
Miller, Arthur. The Crucible.
Monsarrat, Nicholas. The Cruel Sea.
O’Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood.
O'Neill, Eugene. Long Day's Journey into Night.
Orwell, George. 1984.
---. A Collection of Essays.
Pasternak, Boris. Doctor Zhivago.
Poe, Edgar Allan. Short stories.
Remarque, Erich Maria. All Quiet on the Western Front.
Rostand, Edmond. Cyrano de Bergerac.
Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye.
Sayers, Dorothy L. The Nine Tailors.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet.
---. King Lear.
---. Much Ado About Nothing.
---. Sonnets.
Shaw, George Bernard. Pygmalion.
Sheridan, Richard Brinsley. The School for Scandal.
Shute, Nevil. A Town Like Alice.
Sinclair, Upton. The Jungle.
Sophocles. Oedipus Rex.
Steinbeck, John. Of Mice and Men.
Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin.
Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair.
Thoreau, Henry David. Walden.
Tolstoy, Leo. Anna Karenina.
Trollope, Anthony. Barchester Towers.
Turgenev, Ivan. Fathers and Sons.
Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.
Updike, John. Rabbit Run.
Virgil. The Aeneid.
Voltaire. Candide.
Warren, Robert Penn. All the King's Men.
Waugh, Evelyn. A Handful of Dust.
Wharton, Edith. The Age of Innocence.
White, T.H. The Once and Future King.
Wiesel, Elie. Night.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Wilder, Thornton. Our Town.
Williams, Tennessee. A Streetcar Named Desire.
Wolfe, Thomas. Look Homeward, Angel.
Woolf, Virginia. To the Lighthouse.
Wouk, Herman. The Caine Mutiny.

Wright, Richard. Native Son.