28 January 2009

book worm lizzie

i dont know if you notice sidebars, but if you do you may have noticed that mine (to your right over there) has a list of the books i have been reading. i really love to read. i have said it on here before, but i feel like there is this limitless amount of books all piled up in my head in an unorganized, but well-meaning 'to-read' list and i want to read them all- RIGHT NOW! it's as if i believe there will be some test at the end of my life and if i skipped Anna Karenina then i fail or something (yes, that one is on the 'to-read' list as well)... or maybe it's the english major in me that feels like a fraud when people say, "well, in The Catcher in the Rye...etc. etc." and i have to admit that i have never actually gotten around to reading that one yet... although i fully intend to!

so, one day i sat down and made an actual list, which turned into a couple of lists, which got overwhelming, but mostly it's just fun to plan... where am i going will all this?

i want to have a good record of all the good books that i want to read, that you may want to read and that others recommend reading all in one place: my blog. this way anyone who is interested (but selfishly, i feel excited about at least having it for me if no one else cares!) can have a place to come back to if they are looking for a good book to read. just search by "book worm" since i will always label each list as such. i havent come up with my all-time favorites yet, but my most current reads will always be found to your right.

and without further ado- we are starting this out right with a girl i really truly look up to:

Lizzie Heiselt: wife to micah, mother to simon, met her and micah at byuh (he was web/graphic designing for PCC), recently got her masters from NYU, lives in brooklyn, has run a marathon and several other enviable races, cooks like you wouldnt believe and writes like i wish i could... here is a list she compiled after studying at NYU... i'll let her take over from here. she put this on her blog the same day i decided to do this whole book worm thing - kindred spirits? i think so!

Reading List

I tried to write down all the books and authors that my professors told me would be good to read to help develop my writing and just for the sheer joy of reading compelling stories and solid writing. Here's a good sized list of them (in no particular order and with links), in case any of you are interested in that sort of thing. I personally can't vouch for many of them; I put them here as much for my own reference as for anybody else's. If you are interested in more, I can make another list of some of the things we actually read in class (there are a few books at the bottom, but mostly we read articles and stories and chapters of books).

Joan Didion
Adrian Nicole LeBlanc
Gay Talese
V.S. Naipaul
Hemingway's Short Stories
Eudora Welty
Anton Chekov
Anne Tyler
Huckleberry Finn
The Scarlet Letter
Leaves of Grass
Collected Works of Shakespeare
Nathanael West Miss Lonelyhearts
Elmore Leonard When the Women Come Out to Dance
Virginia Wolff A Room of Ones Own
Charles Dickens A December Vision (his social journalism)
E.M. Forester Aspects of the Novel
Percy Lubbock The Craft of Fiction
Prefaces (at least) to Henry James's novels
Frances Fitzgerald Cities on a Hill
James Agee Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Thornton Wilder The Bridge of San Luis Rey
John Hersey Into the Valley
Aristotle's Poetics
Andrew Radford English Syntax
Wayne Booth The Rhetoric of Fiction
James B. Stewart Follow the Story

Other books I read for school and enjoyed enough to share with you:
Jason DeParle American Dream: Three Women, Ten Kids, and a Nation's Drive to End Welfare
Janet Malcolm The Journalist and the Murderer
Joseph Mitchell (anything by Mitchell is great) Up in the Old Hotel
Norman Sims The Literary Journalists
William Finnegan Cold New World: Growing Up in a Harder Country
John Hersey Hiroshima


for this complete list with links- go to her original posting of this awesome list!

11 comments:

melissa said...

lizzie seems like a real cool gal. you've got good ideas for blogging, stefunny.

liko said...

okay, so i think i read less than a quarter of those. depressing. i feel the same way that you do, steph. gotta get reading. oh, but i can say that i read catcher in the rye. heehee.

The Prigmore Family said...

Um please tell me you're not giving up on Goodreads?!!! Afterall, it was I who introduced you to that lil gem.

PS Holden Caufield equals butt. I hated catcher in the rye. All three times I read it. But then again I love Harry Potter so I'm not quite the deep literary critic.

diana palmer said...

i've had holden caulfield on my mind the last couple of days. he's pretty much a real person to me. that's how much i loved catcher in the rye. though it has its fair share of foulness.

and i even read anna karenina. other than that though, i'm illiterate. i did listen to an awesome fresh air with teri gross on npr tonight that featured excerpts from interviews with john updike over the years. he died yesterday from lung cancer and is supposedly one of the great american writers of our time. but when i tried to read him, i couldn't shake the feeling that he was too trashy for me. i LOVED his interviews though. so should he be added to the list?

lizzie said...

Hey! It's me! I feel so privileged. I wish I were half as cool as I sound here. That would be nice. :)

I did read Anna Karenina and I liked it. I haven't read Catcher in the Rye but I mean to.

I have similar feelings about several authors, Diana. I want to read them but then I have to wonder if I'm not just polluting my mind . . . I think if I didn't feel comfortable reading the actual works of an author, reading about them (the works and the author) is good enough for me. That's really what Cliff Notes are for, right?

Brittany said...

i once read "on the banks of plum creek" steph... ha ha (inside family joke). really though i actually have read "catcher in the rye" and i thought it was good and a little inappropriate but i am a prude and not "open-minded" at all so it may be appropriate for all i know.

Ashley said...

oh, On the Banks of Plum Creek, the best book ever.

Stephanie said...

haha! that was the one that ash read for britt right? or was that the seminary make-ups... or was that when i did erin hawley's seminary make-ups?? hehe :)

laurel said...

Whoa..Micha (sp?) really does look like Brendan Moore!! So wierd- I was thinking....why does stephanie have a picture of Brendan Moore on her blog!?

laurel said...

I'm reading a book called "If Holden Caufield Were in My Classroom" and I've been thinking who the heck is Holden Caufield...nooow I get it...

lizzie said...

Diana has been telling us that Micah looks like her brother since we first met. That is funny. Did she tell you to say that Laurel? ;)