fifteen books in fifteen minutes (approximately)

Posted on June 15th, 2009 by Scraps.
Categories: Lists, Words.

Don't take too long to think about it. List 15 books you've read that will always stick with you -- The first 15 you can recall in 15 minutes.

Velma did this on livejournal, and I am curious what books my memory pulls up, especially now with my damaged memory.

  1. Little, Big by John Crowley
  2. The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
  3. At Swim-Two-Birds by Flann O'Brien (aka Brian O'Nolan)
  4. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino
  5. Her Smoke Rose Up Forever by James Tiptree, Jr (aka Alice Sheldon)
  6. Love Trouble by Veronica Geng
  7. The Most of S.J. Perelman
  8. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme
  9. Lanark by Alaisdair Gray
  10. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
  11. The Collected Poetry of James Merril
  12. The Collected Essays of George Orwell [5 vol.]
  13. The Collected Poetry of W.B. Yeats
  14. The Collected Poetry of Emily Dickinson
  15. The Novellas of Hortense Calisher

The Collected Essays of George Orwell is cheating. And I wanted to include a book I'd never read -- probably The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer -- but that felt like cheating, and cheating is proper only once per list, I figure.

Your turn.

2 comments.

Coleman

Comment on June 17th, 2009.

1. Complete Poems, Yeats
2. Lord of Light, Zelazny
3. Bleak House, Dickens
4. Tale of Two Cities, Dickens
5. Cheri/The Last of Cheri, Collette
6. Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky
7. The Stars My Destination, Bester
8. Inferno, Dante
9. Moby Dick, Melville
10. To the Wedding, Berger
11. The English Patient, Ondaatje
12. Kim, Kipling
13. Dierdre, James Stephens
14. The Gay Science, Nietzsche
15. Meditations, Marcus Aurelius

Reading this I find that I never got any older than fifteen.

Good exercise. You should bring it to the WELL.

ethan

Comment on June 17th, 2009.

Argh, I did it and then closed the browser window. Will try again later.

Mine also had Orwell, but it was Homage to Catalonia (the book that radicalized me when I was 16). I really need to work through the collected essays.

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