Since a couple of people listed things that they had to read for school (I omitted those), let me add a few from my 7th grade English class:
The Hobbit, which I loved. It made me go out and read the other three in the LOTR trilogy, which I also enjoyed.
Shane, the cowboy-book. Ugh. What a steaming piece of crap THAT was!
I’ve never read (or even attempted) anything by Pynchon other than The Crying of Lot 49, but I do know it’s a fraction of the length of most of his other works. I think Gravity’s Rainbow is about 800 pages long.
Finished it, no probs. In other Eco-trivia, the first sentence of NoTR is the day I was born!
History of My Life by Giacomo Casanova. 12 Volumes of novelistic length.
They are well written & provided useful insights to someone of my tender age.
I don’t know if proud is the right word – I don’t spend time on books I’m not enjoying, so “getting through a book” isn’t something I do. (Life’s too short.)
I guess I’m proud of my little shelf of classics that I’ve enjoyed reading. Most of them are by Emile Zola .
No offense, Superdude, but if I’d read the complete works of Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, and E.A. Poe, I don’t think I’d have mentioned Harry Potter and Stephen King in the same sentence. It seems to me that, unless you’re 12 or younger, having read all of Harry Potter is roughly equivalent to eating a whole cheesecake by yourself. Not all that hard, except maybe at the end, and nothing to be especially proud of. (Not that I’m being a snob about it: I’ve read the first three Harry Potters and works by all the authors mentioned, although not the complete works of any of them.)
All of Jane Austen’s books, except “Love and Freindship” (yes, that’s the way she spelled it—she was really young when she wrote that one).
I’m also pretty proud of all the books I read in high school: “Gone With the Wind,” “Wuthering Heights,” “Jane Eyre,” “Great Expectations,” to name a few.
None taken.
Well, tomato, tomahto. To me, it’s more then just the books. It’s the…diversity (for lack of a better term) of the subject matter. I enjoyed the HP books in the same manner as masturbation. It gets the job done, but it ain’t exactly like me, S
Damn computer.
That SHOULD read:
I enjoyed the HP books in the same manner as masturbation. It gets the job done, but it ain’t exactly me, Alicia Witt, a weekend in an anonymous hotel, and a jar of KY jelly.
Maybe, maybe not. I read it as a senior in college, and everyone in my class liked it, even the grad students. (I don’t know if many colleges do this, but UNH has many split-level senior/grad classes). Some of my classmates were in their late twenties, so…you might have hated it as a teen, too.
I remember being proud to have finished Le Petit Prince when I was a young ouisey.
As for a book that I loved and made me proud of the insight it gave me: Wild Swans by Jung Chang.
I’ll second twicksters “Remembrance of Things Past,” by Marcel Proust . I’ve read the first five volumes, (and the Letters), which interested me most anyway. The remaining two, Sodom and Gomorra I and II, are mainly about the 1880’s Paris’ gay scene, and not really my cup of tea.
But what I’m really proud of, is how much I enjoyed reading Proust. The guy is fun. And he is capable of putting thoughts into words that you never knew you had untill you raed him. I don’t know why “Remembrance” has such a heavy philosophical reputation.
My biggest shame is that I never got more then five pages into James Joyce. All form, no content, Joyce. Proust on the other hand is all content (psychology and sociology), perfectly worded. His only drawback is form: the halfpage-long sentences.
Mmh… maybe there are Proust-fans and Joyce-fans, in the same way you have cat-persons and dog-persons?
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter
I, too, got all the way through Foucault’s Pendulum and The Name of the Rose one summer, and succeeded in doing so only because of a particular history course I had just finished taking that put everything into context beautifully.
Other length or esoteric volumes I managed to get through:
Das Boot – Translated into English, of course. Kind of awkward to read from the outset since it’s one of the only books I’ve ever read in first person, present tense. Dull, ponderous, repetitive…and someone, when I finally closed it, I couldn’t help but declare it to be magnificent.
Papillion – It’s not really remarkable that I got through this book, it’s that I first read it in sixth grade. Quite a departure for me, and I have no idea what prompted me to pick it up in the first place.
The major works of Solzhenitsyn: Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, Cancer Ward, First Circle, The Gulag Archipelago, August 1914 and a couple of the other “month, year” books (don’t remember which ones exactly)…and I LIKED them.
But I guess the reading feat I was most proud of was reading the Lord of the Rings as a little kid. It really felt like an achievement back then.
Can’t disagree – although I liked Dubliners and Portrait, I went belly-up about a third of the way through Ulysses.
[sheepishly raises hand] I finished it. What a waste. I thought I had a pretty big vocabulary but I remember reading it with a dictionary nearby.
I read that one senior year I think. It really hit me when I thought about what he considered a good day:
He got a care package and didn’t have all of it eaten by the guards, no one stole the crust of bread he saved from breakfast, he got a bit more watery gruel to eat, he got a cushy job laying brick in the snow…
What, you don’t call that a good day? Damn spoilt capitalist with your portable gramophones and Coca Cola…
Well, at least I know which one I’m least proud of reading…
I read the entire A confederacy of dunces - a great book - at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. OK, I was a student, and broke, but still… I should have forked out those few bucks.