8.11.2009

A Bike and A Library Card

Fact: Matt and I live within easy biking distance of Woodridge's public library.
Fact: One of the first things we did when we moved here was to get library cards.
Fact: I bought a bike this summer.

Inspiration: I found this list today of one blogger's ranking of the 100 greatest writers of all time. Of course there are a variety of opinions as to who should be added/removed from the list (I have a few names that I would have liked to see), but in general, it's a sturdy list, making me proud to have read a number of works by a number of the authors, and making me feel guilty for the authors I have not experienced and works I have not read.

Scrolling through the list made me want to re-visit a number of works that I have previously read: Leaves of Grass (Whitman), The Sound and the Fury (Faulkner), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Joyce), Four Quartets (Eliot), Notes from Underground (Dostoyevsky).

It made me want to delve deeper into the works of certain authors and poets, either because I am unfamiliar with their work, or because I have only dabbled shallowly into their work: T.S. Eliot, Frank O'Hara, John Steinbeck (I really need to read The Grapes of Wrath!), William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Anton Chekhov, Ernest Hemingway, Rumi, James Joyce, and Flannery O'Connor (always more of her...I love her stuff).

If I could add a few people to the list, I would add Kurt Vonnegut, J.R.R. Tolkien, J.D. Salinger, Robert Frost, and perhaps Soren Kierkegaard. But I'm not sure that I could come up with enduring reasons for adding them besides that fact that I enjoy and admire their writing.

How about you? Who would you add? And who else would you have me read?

Conclusion: Tonight might be the night to bike to the library after dinner and load up on books. I'm seriously behind on my summer reading. And seriously behind on my life reading. It's about time I changed that.

2 comments:

  1. I'm not all that well read. I scrolled through the list and have never heard of most of them. I've tried to read "The Sound and the Fury" a few times and just can't. My tastes aren't very high brow and a lot of the great writers and the "classics" just aren't accessible enough for me.

    Who would I add? How about J.K. Rowling? Walter Wangerin Jr.? If the list includes poets, Bob Dylan?

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  2. I love everything John Steinbeck has written. I also love a newer writer, Jhumpa Lahiri. Her Interpreter of Maladies, Unaccustomed Earth and Namesake novels (both Maladies & Earth are short stories) are so good!

    If you're not a member of Goodreads (www.Goodreads.com), you should be! Then, be friends with me (jenny.smith@gmail.com)!

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