A Break From My Ranting

I thought we all could use a break from my kvetching about the dissolution of my marriage. I know I sure as hell could use one! And seeing as how a whole bunch of my fancy-pants, book learnin', writer-type blogger pals are doing this hoity toity meme that makes you realize just how pathetically read I am, I'm gonna do it, too.

Now I already gave Stacy the caveat that I will have to adjust the book list for nerdly geeks like me. Because:
A) I was a computer science/physics/math major in college
B) I dropped out of said college
C) I read voraciously throughout my college years and 20s but only sci fi and myth & fantasy.

Hello, my name is L y n e t t e and I'm a total dork.

So if Stacy could make her own book meme, well, I'm makin' my own. Now I can make you all read a list of books where you'll all go, "Who? What book? Huh?" But I will leave a few of hers on there just to keep me humble.

Here's how it goes:

Directions:

• Use blue font for everything you’ve read
• Use red font for everything you’ve started but never finished
• Use purple font for everything you’ve read but wish you hadn’t
• Use yellow font for everything you’d never read, even if you and that book were the only things to survive the apocalypse
• Use black font for things you’ve never read
• Use green front for things you want to read
• Use orange font if you’ve read the author but not that particular work
• Use pink if you've never turned a page of it but you saw a play, movie or TV show based on the work (I added this just so my list would have more than just black)
  

Stacy's List:
The Bible (I'm probably one of the few people who is being honest here and saying I'm not sure I made it through all the minor prophets and I am sure I never finished Revelations)
Medea, Euripides (I was actually IN the play)
Oedipus Rex, Sophocles
Odyssey, Homer
The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer
The Inferno, Dante Alighieri
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, William Shakespeare
Tartuffe, Moliere
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (oh dear - I know I just lost some blogger friends with this admission)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Eve of St. Agnes, John Keats
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Wuthering Heights, Emily Bronte
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne
Moby Dick, Herman Melville
Great Expectations, Charles Dickens
Little Women, Louise May Alcott
War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy
Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (and I give myself extra points because I used to make his sandwiches as a prep-cook - not easy, that)
The Awakening, Kate Chopin
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
Ulysses, James Joyce
Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway
The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck (I read the last page...)
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner
The Fellowship of the Ring, J.R.R. Tolkien
To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee (Gregory Peck, you rock)
Lord of the Flies, William Golding
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov (extra points because I got this book only because The Police sing about it)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Tennessee Williams
The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath
A Good Man is Hard to Find, Flannery O’Connor (never read it but boy do I know it!)
Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Joyce Carol Oates
Love in the Time of Cholera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
White Noise, Don DeLillo
The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison
The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie
White Teeth, Zadie Smith
Middlesex, Jeffrey Eugenides
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, JK Rowling
Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

Optional:
Untitled Memoir, Trish Ryan
Masochism is Always Funny: a Novel, Stacy Brazalovich

The Nerdly Geek Adendum:
The Unbearable Lightness Of Being, Milan Kundera (this should be pink then blue because I saw the movie as I see all things Daniel Day Lewis. It made me want to wear bowler derbies. I got the book to see how the movies stacked up. I liked the book but liked the movie better. I'm a dork.)
The Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper (this should be pink then blue. Again, I'll see anything with a partly clad Daniel Day Lewis. But what a bonus I got with his hotter than hot adoptive brother Uncus. Yes, please!)
Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy (honestly, what is with the Russian agriculture minutiae?! I read this one because the heroine in The Unbearable Lightness of Being carried it around with her. What a wonderful story this could be if we didn't have to read through all that at crap.)
The Posessed, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (a well meaning, well-read friend tried to up the caliber of my reading list. If I thought Tolstoy could drone on, this made me want to put my eyes out with my own thumbs)
Guns, Germs & Steel, Jared Diamond (I have yet to finish this one thanks to the loss of my long commute once I started working from home. But it should be required reading for all high school history buffs.)
The Hobbit, JRR Tolkien
Every other Lord of The Rings book, JRR Tolkien
The Silmarillion, JRR Tolkein
The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks
The other two Shannara books from the original trilogy, Terry Brooks (it should have stopped here)
The four really bad books that make up the Heritage of Shannara, Terry Brooks
The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant The Unbeliever, Stephen R Donaldson (Now THIS is what a fantasy trilogy should be. In my book, these blow away the LOTR. Blasphemy, I know. But there it is.)
The Second Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Stephen R Donaldson (the last book of this trilogy was one of the first books to actually make me cry on a Boston subway)
The five books of The Gap Series, Stephen R Donaldson (I'm loyal to good authors, what can I say. This stuff ventured into sci-fi and it worked.)
The two books of Mordent's Need, Stephen R Donaldson (did this really surprise you?)
The Awakeners - Northsore & Southshore, Sheri S Tepper (she rocks - even if you don't like the genre)
The Gate to Women's Country, Sheri S Tepper (again, you don't have to like the genre to love this one)
Pretty much anything I can find by Sheri S Tepper, I've read
Druids, Morgan Llewelyn (can't type that without hearing Spinal Tap in my head)
The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley (a disfigured Lancelot, a wimpy Gwen, and a Morgan that kicks butt - Camelot from the women's perspective)
A Dream of Eagles (Camulod Chronicles), Jack Whyte (I've read every single one and love love love them. The most probable telling of the Arthurian legend.)
The Foundation Series (Original & Extended), Isaac Asimov
The Robot Series, Isaac Asimov
The Galactic Empire Series, Isaac Asimov (you can see where this is going...)
Anything written by Isaac Asimov
Incarnations of Immortality (all 8 of them), Piers Anthony
The Xanth Series, Piers Anthony (there are over 30 of these. I think I stopped after about 12)

There are so many more that I just can't think of. I have huge collections of Arthurian legend, all things Robin hood, all things druid and Celtic legend. I have started reading up on Rome, it's history, it's leaders, everything I can find - yes, thanks to HBO's short lived series.

Some day I could just bore you all to tears by listing all of the books I've read. Based on the books you all tell me you read, none of you would really know any of them.