How's The Reading Going, Slacker?

Let me tell you, I am eating up DMZ and Fables right now. Brian Wood is by far one of my favorite authors and not only in graphic novels.

I guess I should address the fact that I will transpose the terms "comic book" and "graphic novel" for no better reason other than, regardless of the argument I do not see the benefit of using either term. I don't find one more or less correct than the other. Perhaps one day I will stick to one, but for now, it may be comic book and it may be graphic novel.

So, with that said, I have been reading a lot more comic books and Brontes literature than traditional novels. I've recently taken up re-reading The Belgian Essays, written by Emily and Charlotte Bronte and edited by Sue Lonoff. As interesting as I find it, I am most likely not going to blog about it. It's hard to find and it's a collection of basically corrected homework. Then again, maybe I will blog about why I love it and why any good Brontes lover will read it.

Anyway, here are the novels I need to write about:
1) DMZ (Trades #1-5)
2) Fables (Trades 1-6)
3) Queen & Country: Definitive Collection (#1)
4) Fell

-- Traditional novels? Er, none. Yet. I will probably put The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Bronte on the list. I have this top secret project I'm working on that requires a indepth look at the novel. Oh, and it isn't graduate school applications.

Catching Up to Square One

Okay, so I have been doing a lot of reading since I moved to Philadelphia and got myself a library card. I love the library. I just have not really written about my views, key points I should remember, etc. So, I'll start on square one again, but first I'll tell you that when I found the 100 Greatest American Books or whatever, I have read more on this list. The ones I've read are in Italics. For the purposes of this blog and because can I really keep up with another one at this point? I will write about almost everything I read, i.e. poetry, short stories, novels, graphic novels and knitting books. Just kidding about the knitting books.

Anyway, I finished Queen and Country by Greg Rucka on Christmas, so I hope that will be my first review.

* 1984 - George Orwell
* A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess
* A Dance to the Music of Time - Anthony Powell
* A Death in the Family - James Agee
* A Handful of Dust - Evelyn Waugh
* A House for Mr. Biswas - V.S. Naipaul
* A Passage to India - E. M. Forster (read for school)
* All the King's Men - Robert Penn Warren
* American Pastoral - Philip Roth
* An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
* Animal Farm - George Orwell read in 9th grade?
* Appointment in Samarra - John O'Hara
* Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret - Judy Blume haha.
* At Swim-Two-Birds - Flann O'Brien
* Atonement - Ian McEwan
* Beloved - Toni Morrison
* Blood Meridian - Cormac McCarthy
* Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
* Call It Sleep - Henry Roth
* Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
* Death Comes for the Archbishop - Willa Cather
* Deliverance - James Dickey
* Dog Soldiers - Robert Stone
* Falconer - John Cheever
* Go Tell it on the Mountain - James Baldwin
* Gone With the Wind - Margaret Mitchell
* Gravity's Rainbow - Thomas Pynchon
* Herzog - Saul Bellow
* Housekeeping - Marilynne Robinson
* I, Claudius - Robert Graves
* Infinite Jest - David Foster Wallace
* Invisible Man - Ralph Ellison
* Light in August - William Faulkner
* Lolita - Vladimir Nabakov
* Lord of the Flies - William Golding
* Loving - Henry Green
* Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis
* Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
* Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
* Naked Lunch - William Burroughs
* Native Son - Richard Wright
* Neuromancer - William Gibson
* Never Let Me Go - Kazuo Ishiguro
* One Flew Over the Cukoo's Nest - Ken Kesey
* Pale Fire - Vladimir Nabokov
* Play It As It Lays - Joan Didion
* Portnoy's Complaint - Philip Roth
* Possession - A.S. Byatt
* Rabbit, Run - John Updike
* Ragtime - E.L. Doctorow
* Red Harvest - Dashiell Hammett
* Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
* Slaughterhouse-Five - Kurt Vonnegut
* Snow Crash - Neal Stephenson
* The Adventures of Augie March - Saul Bellow
* The Assistant - Bernard Malamud
* The Berlin Stories - Christopher Isherwood
* The Big Sleep - Raymond Chandler
* The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
* The Bridge of San Luis Rey - Thornton Wilder
* The Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
* The Confessions of Natt Turner - William Styron
* The Corrections - Johnathan Franzen
* The Crying of Lot 49 - Thomas Pynchon
* The Day of the Locust - Nathanael West
* The Death of the Heart - Elizabeth Bowen
* The French Lieutenant's Woman - John Fowles
* The Golden Notebook - Doris Lessing
* The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
* The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
* The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - Carson McCullers
* The Heart of the Matter - Graham Greene
* The Lion, the With, and the Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
* The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
* The Man Who Loves Children - Christina Stead
* The Moviegower - Walker Percy
* The Painted Bird - Jerzy Kosinski
* The Power and the Glory - Graham Greene
* The Prime of MIss Jean Brodie - Muriel Spark
* The Recognitions - William Gaddis
* The Sheltering Sky - Paul Bowles
* The Sot-Weed Factor - John Barth
* The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
* The Sportswriter - Richard Ford
* The Spy Who Came in From the Cold - John le Carre
* The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway
* Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
* Things Fall Apart - Chinua Achebe
* To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
* To the Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
* Tropic of Cancer - Henry Miller
* Ubik - Philip K. Dick
* Under the Net - Irish Murdoch
* Under the Volcano - Malcolm Lowry
* Watchmen - Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons
* White Noise - Don DeLillo
* White Teeth - Zadie Smith
* Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys

Oh, I'm probably not going to use this list much, but I like it for some reason.

SLOWLY READING STILL.

i have read maybe two of the books on this list? i'm working on grad school apps and finding a real job for a real girl. right now, i have two blogs, but i'm going to get this one back up and running so I can practice writing again. i know if you're reading this you'll be mad you have to follow yet another blog, but it's not really content that should be mixed with my personal life and guinea pig names (keep reading if you are confused.)

Here are my other two blogs for now:
a FOLKTASTIC life
in general, a Little Mermaid-esque collection of my life. on a blog. . . you know, pictures, stuff i do, knitting, whosits and whatsits galore.

Guinea Pig Daily
this is more of an inside joke than anything, but i plan to keep it up as long as i find it funny. it's a new guinea pig name i think up every day.

oh, i will be using correct grammar and stuff in the future.

I am reading, I swear!

I think Blogger is angry that I have so many drafts and so few published posts in this blog. I know, Blogger, GEEZ!

Right now, I have two unfinished reviews. One is about The Sound and the Fury and the other is Franny and Zooey. It will take me a while to write reviews, but I think it's more important that I actually finished the books. Yes, I know that F&Z is not on the list, but it is still a book I've wanted to read for a while.

What I'm reading now:
Grapes of Wrath -- John Steinbeck (haven't made it through the first couple pages)
Fahrenheit 451 -- Ray Bradbury (not on the list, but still an important book!)

Opening Blog and Challenge

Recently, I graduated from college with an English degree. All jokes aside, I am afraid of slowly turning my brain to mush and hve been looking for a list of books to read. As I was poking around the internets, I stumbled across this list: