Newsweek recently asked readers what five books they most want to read. Here's the list of most popular wanna-reads:
The Aeneid, Virgil
The Bible
“Crime and Punishment,” Fyodor Dostoevsky
“The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand
“The Grapes of Wrath,” John Steinbeck
“Gravity’s Rainbow,” Thomas Pynchon
“The Human Condition,” Hannah Arendt
“The Iraq Study Group Report: The Way Forward, A New Approach”
“Jane Eyre,” Charlotte Bronte
“Leaves of Grass,” Walt Whitman
“The Major Works,” John Donne
“Moby-Dick,” Herman Melville
“One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez
“Paradise Lost,” John Milton
“The Pilgrim’s Progress,” John Bunyan
“Remembrance of Things Past,” Marcel Proust
“Ulysses,” James Joyce
“War and Peace,” Leo Tolstoy
Interesting list! I'm sorry to say the only one of those I've read is Jane Eyre. I suppose Virgil (and not Homer) is there because of the recent publicity around Robert Fagles' new translation. And where is Shakespeare? It can't be any harder to read than Joyce, can it?
Is anyone up for a meme? What are your top five wanna-reads? Here are mine:
- The Bible
- The Odyssey
- The Divine Comedy
- Paradise Lost
- Shakespeare (all of it)
Very predictable, I suppose, but it's hard to go wrong with books that have been revered for centuries.
sort of via Book World
