Photo by ginnerobot.
My newest project: to read all the novels on Wikipedia’s Great American Novel list. For the sake of simplicity, because the list is constantly changing–apparently the criteria for what makes a Great American Novel is an issue at least as contentious as Roe v. Wade or the Israeli/Palestinian conflict–I’ll work from the version that was up when I started the project:
- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
- Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick
- Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
- F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
- William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
- John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy
- John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath
- J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
- Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
- Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita
- Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird
- Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow
- Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections
Since I’ve already read them, I’m crossing Huck Finn, Gatsby, Catcher, and To Kill a Mockingbird off the list immediately. That leaves me with nine books before I lose interest in this project. Feel free to place bets on how far I’ll actually get.
Yes, I am ashamed of the fact that I was an English major and a lifelong book nerd who’s closing in on 30 and still hasn’t made it to Steinbeck and Nabokov. And yes, I am updating my blog about books on a Friday night. But wait–that’s not the nerdiest part! The nerdiest part is that I skipped out on a party tonight so I could but update my blog about books, read Kazuo Ishiguro and drink whiskey-spiked cider by myself. A+!
