A Year of Themes (the plan for 2006)

Submitted by misscurly on Tue, 11/15/2005 - 04:47
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  • Classics
  • The "you should have read this back in high school" pieces. I'm leaning towards Western classics, only because I'm most familiar with those
  • "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne
  • "The Pilgrim's Progress" by John Bunyan
  • "The Old Man and the Sea" Ernest Hemmingway
  • "Dr. Strangelove" by Peter George
  • "The Winter of Our Discontent" by John Steinbeck
  • "Billy Budd and Other Stories" by Herman Melville
  • "Emma" by Jane Austen
  • "The Prince" by Niccolo Machiavelli
  • "Great Gatsby" by F Scott Fitzgerald
  • "Republic" by Plato
  • "Canterbury Tales" by Geoffery Chaucer
  • "Robinson Crusoe" Daniel Defoe
  • "Don Quixote" Cervantes
  • "Cyrano de Bergerac" by Edmond Rostand
  • "Oedipus Rex" by Sophocles
  • "Prometheus Bound" by Aeschylus
  • "Metamorphoses" by Ovid
  • N Degrees of Seperation
  • A succession of pieces that are somehow related, whether by subject matter, title, or references
  • 1. "The Oddyssey" by Homer
  • 2."The Illiad" by Homer
  • 3."The Aenid" by Virgil
  • 4."Ulysses" by James Joyce
  • 1."The Hours" by Virginia Woolf
  • 2."Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" by Edward Albee
  • 3. "Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life" by Julia Briggs
  • 1. "American Psycho" by Bret Easton Ellis
  • 2. "Mein Kampf" by Adolf Hitler
  • 3. "Last Victim" by Jason Moss
  • 4. "I Have Lived in the Monster" Robert Ressler
  • 1. "The War of the Worlds" by HG Wells
  • 2. "Bel Canto" by Ann Patchett
  • 3. "Reading Lolita in Tehran" Azar Nafisi
  • 4. "Invitation to a Beheading" by Vladimir Nabokov
  • 5."Resurrection" by David Remnick
  • Plays
  • I know that it's weird to read plays, instead of seeing them, but I think that if you do both you understand what's going on better. Especially with Shakespeare.
  • The Tempest by Shakespeare
  • The Taming of the Shrew by Shakespeare
  • A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams
  • We Won't Pay! We Won't Pay! And Other Works by Dario Fo (Nobel 1997)
  • Our Town by Thornton Wilder
  • Tartuffe by Moliere
  • Trilogy: Molly, Malone Dies, The Unamable - Samuel Beckett
  • Short Stories
  • "Beyond Armageddon" by Walter M Miller
  • "Complete Works of Edgar Allen Poe" by Edgar Allen Poe (relevant pieces to be named)
  • "The Red Room (and other Short Stories by H.G. Wells" by HG Wells, John Hammond
  • The Best Science Fiction there is!
  • "Dune" by Frank Herbert
  • "The Left Hand of Darkness" by Ursula K Le Guin
  • "The Dispossessed" by Ursula K LeGuin
  • "The Telling" by Ursula K LeGuin
  • "The Stars My Destination" by Alfred Bester
  • "Ender's Game" by ORson Scott Card
  • "Lucifer's Hammer" by Larry Niven
  • "The Last Ship" by W Brinkley
  • "Only Begotten Daughter" by James Morrow
  • "Towing Jehovah" by James Morrow
  • "Blameless in Abaddon" by James Morrow
  • "The Eternal Footman" by James Morrow
  • "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" by R A Heinlein
  • "Childhood's End" Arthur C Clarke
  • "Alas, Babylon" by Nevil Shute
  • "Eternity Road" by Jack McDevitt
  • "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute
  • "A Wrinkle in the Skin" by John Christopher
  • "A Gift Upon the Shore" by M K Wren
  • "Ape and Essence" by Aldous Huxley
  • Williams
  • Stuff by Williams. The genre doesn't matter, and a mix would be more interesting. I'm not really going to learn much this way, it just sounds fun.
  • "Neuromancer" by William Gibson
  • "Buffalo Bill" by William F Cody
  • "The Moonstone" by William Wilkie Collins
  • "The Woman in White" by William Wilkie Collins
  • "Absalom, Absalom!" by William Faulkner
  • "As I Lay Dying" by William Faulkner
  • "Green Mansions" by William Henry Hudson
  • "Rites of Passage" by William Golding
  • "The Inheritors" by William Golding
  • Feminism
  • I really need help with this one
  • "Listen Up: Voices from the Next Feminist Generation" Barbara Findlen
  • "Surfacing" by Margaret Atwood
  • "In the Flesh" by Christa Wolf
  • "The Colour Purple" by Alice Walker
  • Utopias
  • My favourite genre. I think I'll make this Miss January
  • "The Wanderground: Stories of Hill Women" by Sally Miller Gearhart
  • "Woman on the Edge of Time" by Marge Piercy
  • "Herland" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
  • "Erewhon" by Samuel Butler
  • "News from Nowhere" by William Morris
  • "Walden Two" by B. F. Skinner
  • "Island" Aldous Huxley
  • "Anthem" by Ayn Rand
  • "Mosquito Coast" by Paul Theroux
  • Books that Won Nobel Prizes (for literature)
  • "The Piano Teacher" by Elfriede Jelinek (2004)
  • "Dusklands" by J M Coetzee (2003)
  • "Kaddish for a Child Not Born" by Imre Ketesz (2002)
  • "A House for Mr. Biswas" by V S Naipaul (2001)
  • "Soul Mountain" by Gao Xingjian (2000)
  • "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass (1999)
  • Canadiana
  • "Alias Grace" by Margaret Atwood
  • "Red Silk" by Rishma Dunlop and Priscila Uppal
  • "The Book of Secrets" by M G Vassenji
  • Travel
  • It would be nice to get a mix of both fiction and non-fiction for this one
  • "The Travels of Marco Polo" by Marco Polo
  • "Westward, Ho!" Charles Kingsley
  • "The Oregon Trail" by Franic Parkman
  • "Conquest of Mexico" by Bernal Diez Del Castillo
  • The Bronte Sisters
  • Prolific young writers that they were
  • "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Bronte
  • "Agnes Grey" by Anne Bronte
  • "The Tenet of Wildfell Hall" by Anne Bronte
  • "Villette" by Charlotte Bronte
  • "The Green Dwarf" by Charlotte Bronte
  • "The Professor" by Charlotte Bronte
  • "Shirley" by Charlotte Bronte
  • Stephen King
  • "Carrie"
  • "Salem's Lot"
  • "Rage"
  • "The Shining"
  • "Night Shift"
  • "The Stand"
  • "The Dead Zone"
  • It all happened in India...
  • Settings all in India
  • "Midnight's Children" by Salman Rushdie
  • "Joothan: A Dalit's Life" Arun Mukherjee
  • "Brick Lane" by Monica Ali
  • "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling
  • "Kim" by Rudyard Kipling
  • Reality.. .Literature?
  • "Sibyl" by Flora Rheta Schreiber
  • "Michelle Remembers" by Michelle Smith
  • "How We Think" by John Dewey
  • "Decline of the West" by Oswald Spengler
  • The Russians
  • "Lolita" by Vladimir Nabokov
  • "Crime and Punishment" by Fyoder Dostoyevsky
  • "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy
  • "The Brothers Karamazov" by Fyoder Dostoyevsky
  • "The Idiot" by Fyoder Dostoyevsky
  • "The Possessed" by Feodor Dostoyevsky
  • Holocaust
  • "Schindler's List" by Thomas Kneally
  • "Dawn" Elie Weisel
  • "Survival in Auschwitz" by Primo Levy
  • "The Accident" Elie Weisel
  • "The Forgotten" Elie Weisel
  • "A Beggar in Jerusalem" Elie Weisel
  • Bildungsroman
  • See This essay
  • "The Chosen" Chaim Potok
  • "Emile" JJ Rousseau
  • "David Copperfield" Charles Dickens
  • "Awakening" by Kate Chopin
  • "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" by Thomas Hardy
  • "Middlemarch" George Eliot
  • "The Tin Drum" by Gunter Grass
  • "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf
  • I'm Never Growing Up!
  • "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" by C S Lewis
  • "Pippi Longstocking" by Astrid Lindgren
  • "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London
  • "The Jungle Book" by Rudyard Kipling
  • "Wind in the Willows" by Kenneth Grahame
  • "The Twits" by Roald Dahl
  • "Charlie and the Chocolate Facotory" by Roald Dahl
  • "Artemis Fowl" by Eoin Colfer
  • "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Caroll
  • "The Princess Diaries" by Meg Cabot
  • "Fairy Tales and Stories" by Hans Christian Anderson
  • "Watership Down" by Richard Adams
  • Survivalism
  • "Crisis Preparedness Handbook" by Jack A. Spigarelli
  • "Soap: Making it, Enjoying it" by Ann Bramson
  • "Ditch Medicine" by Hugh Coffee
  • "Survivalist's Medicine Chest" by Ragnar Benson
  • "The SAS Survival Handbook" by John 'Lofty' Wiseman
  • "How to Open Locks with Improvised Tools" by Hans Conkel
  • "Essential Wilderness Navigator" by David Seidman, Paul Cleveland
  • "Wilderness Living" by Gregory J. Davenport
Author Comments: 

I've decided that if I throw a little more structure into my reading plan, it might provide a better understanding of certain topics. So each month gets a theme, from which I will read selections from this list of possibles. That way I can mix it up a bit, but still learn.

These are possible themes. Suggestions are welcome for both selections and themes.