English poseur

When I was an English major, I had this theory about the students in the program. There were the people who were interested in langauge, and then there were the poseurs that settled on it as a default major because they couldn't think of anything else. They were the folks that never did the reading, never talked in class, etc.

Thanks to daisyglaze, there's a meme going around the journals I actually want to do.

The CollegeBoard list of great books
The ones I've read are in bold and I will annotate and stuff. Note that I am not even gonna touch the idea of the canon or what it really means to be familiar with great books. We could argue this list all day.

?, - Beowulf (Grendel should probably be here, too...)
Achebe, Chinua - Things Fall Apart
Agee, James - A Death in the Family
Austen, Jane - Pride and Prejudice
Baldwin, James - Go Tell It on the Mountain
Beckett, Samuel - Waiting for Godot
Bellow, Saul - The Adventures of Augie March
Brontë, Charlotte - Jane Eyre (Jasper Fforde will probably make more sense to me when I finally get to this.)
Brontë, Emily - Wuthering Heights
Camus, Albert - The Stranger
Cather, Willa - Death Comes for the Archbishop
Chaucer, Geoffrey - The Canterbury Tales
Chekhov, Anton - The Cherry Orchard
Chopin, Kate - The Awakening
Conrad, Joseph - Heart of Darkness
Cooper, James Fenimore - The Last of the Mohicans
Crane, Stephen - The Red Badge of Courage
Dante - Inferno
de Cervantes, Miguel - Don Quixote (There's a new translation of this that I just picked up and will start Real Soon Now)
Defoe, Daniel - Robinson Crusoe
Dickens, Charles - A Tale of Two Cities (I would also add A Christmas Carol and pretty much everything else, actually.)
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor - Crime and Punishment
Douglass, Frederick - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (Took an entire course on slave narratives, actually. Man, I miss Fred Moten)
Dreiser, Theodore - An American Tragedy
Dumas, Alexandre - The Three Musketeers
Eliot, George - The Mill on the Floss
Ellison, Ralph - Invisible Man
Emerson, Ralph Waldo - Selected Essays
Faulkner, William - As I Lay Dying
Faulkner, William - The Sound and the Fury
Fielding, Henry - Tom Jones
Fitzgerald, F. Scott - The Great Gatsby
Flaubert, Gustave - Madame Bovary
Ford, Ford Madox - The Good Soldier (I am indebted to Brooks Landon for pointing out that this book is best read in the voice of Emo Phillips)
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von - Faust
Golding, William - Lord of the Flies
Hardy, Thomas - Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Hawthorne, Nathaniel - The Scarlet Letter
Heller, Joseph - Catch-22
Hemingway, Ernest - A Farewell to Arms
Homer - The Iliad
Homer - The Odyssey
Hugo, Victor - The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Hurston, Zora Neale - Their Eyes Were Watching God
Huxley, Aldous - Brave New World
Ibsen, Henrik - A Doll's House
James, Henry - The Portrait of a Lady
James, Henry - The Turn of the Screw
Joyce, James - A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (I took an entire course on Ulysses, too. That should count for something.)
Kafka, Franz - The Metamorphosis
Kingston, Maxine Hong - The Woman Warrior
Lee, Harper - To Kill a Mockingbird
Lewis, Sinclair - Babbitt
London, Jack - The Call of the Wild
Mann, Thomas - The Magic Mountain
Marquez, Gabriel García - One Hundred Years of Solitude
Melville, Herman - Bartleby the Scrivener
Melville, Herman - Moby Dick
Miller, Arthur - The Crucible
Morrison, Toni - Beloved
O'Connor, Flannery - A Good Man is Hard to Find
O'Neill, Eugene - Long Day's Journey into Night
Orwell, George - Animal Farm
Pasternak, Boris - Doctor Zhivago
Plath, Sylvia - The Bell Jar
Poe, Edgar Allan - Selected Tales (We sang "The Tell-Tale Heart" in show choir once, too)
Proust, Marcel - Swann's Way
Pynchon, Thomas - The Crying of Lot 49 (This and Gravity's Rainbow are on my list of books to read...)
Remarque, Erich Maria - All Quiet on the Western Front
Rostand, Edmond - Cyrano de Bergerac (Also on my list)
Roth, Henry - Call It Sleep
Salinger, J.D. - The Catcher in the Rye (again, on my list)
Shakespeare, William - Hamlet
Shakespeare, William - Macbeth
Shakespeare, William - A Midsummer Night's Dream
Shakespeare, William - Romeo and Juliet (I'd also argue for the inclusion of Merchant of Venice and Henry V in this list, even though they're kind of problematic.)
Shaw, George Bernard - Pygmalion
Shelley, Mary - Frankenstein (Bunches of times)
Silko, Leslie Marmon - Ceremony
Solzhenitsyn, Alexander - One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
Sophocles - Antigone
Sophocles - Oedipus Rex
Steinbeck, John - The Grapes of Wrath (I liked Travels With Charley a lot, too.)
Stevenson, Robert Louis - Treasure Island
Stowe, Harriet Beecher - Uncle Tom's Cabin
Swift, Jonathan - Gulliver's Travels
Thackeray, William - Vanity Fair
Thoreau, Henry David - Walden (There is a great children's book based on this, too, called Henry Hikes to Fitchburg.)
Tolstoy, Leo - War and Peace (on the list, too)
Turgenev, Ivan - Fathers and Sons
Twain, Mark - The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (This book is just fascinating on so many levels, and you can talk about the criticism almost as much as the book itself)
Voltaire - Candide (We watched this in an opera class, too, if you can believe it.)
Vonnegut, Kurt Jr. - Harrison Bergeron (Not this one but a ton of others)
Walker, Alice - The Color Purple
Wharton, Edith - The House of Mirth
Welty, Eudora - Collected Stories
Whitman, Walt - Leaves of Grass
Wilde, Oscar - The Picture of Dorian Gray (What, not The Importance of Being Earnest?)
Williams, Tennessee - The Glass Menagerie
Woolf, Virginia - To the Lighthouse
Wright, Richard - Native Son