Books.

[hippie_chick]

I am a great lover of books. Reading and the love of it was instilled in me at a young age by my parents. I sadly don't do as much reading as I'd like to anymore, but am making a conscious effort to change that.

To Kill A Mockingbird ...I just started last night to re read this classic book after having been a few years. It is a story that we can all relate to in one way or another. There is no nobler a man in literature in my mind than Atticus Finch. A couple of my favorite Atticus quotes are:

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin but you begin anyway and you see it through no matter what. You rarely win, but sometimes you do."
-Atticus Finch

"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mockingbird."
-Atticus Finch

I highly recommend it to any of you who have not read it. And after you've read the book, the movie is a *must*.

Since I just did the movie list, and just in case you were wondering, here's the ultimate list of

I've bolded the ones I've read, though alot of them not that recently.

The Illiad - Homer
The Odyssey - Homer
The Aeneid - Virgil
Beowulf - Unknown
The Divine Comedy - Dante Alighieri
The Travels of Marco Polo - Maro Polo
Canterbury Tales - Geoffrey Chaucer
Don Quixote- Cervantes
Paradise Lost - John Milton
The Pilgrim's Progess - John Bunyan
Robinson Crusoe - Daniel Defoe
Moll Flanders - Daniel Defoe
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
Tom Jones - Henry Fielding
Candide - Voltaire
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Tragedy of Faust - Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe
The Lady of the Lake - Sir Walter Scott
Ivanhoe - Sir Walter Scott
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
The Red and the Black - Stendahl
The Last of the Mohicans - James Fenimore Cooper
The Three Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas
Carmen - Prosper Merimee
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
Vanity Fair - William M. Thackeray
David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
A Tale of Two Cities - Dickens
Great Expectations - Dickens
The Scarlet Letter - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Camile - Alexandre Dumas Fils
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Idyls of the King - Alfred Lord Tennyson
Silas Marner - George Eliot
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
Fathers and Sons - Ivan Turgenev
Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevski
The Brothers Kaaramazov - Fyodor Dostoyevski
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
Far from the Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer - Mark Twain
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
The Return of the Native - Thomas Hardy
Tess of the D'Ubervilles- Thomas Hardy
The Portait of a Lady - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Treasure Island - Robert Louis Stevenson
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
The Time Machine - H.G. Wells
Dracula - Bram Stoker
The way of all Flesh - Samuel Butler
Call of the Wild - Jack London
Babbitt - Sinclair Louis
An American Tragedy - Theodore Dreiser
The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms- Ernest Hemingway
The Old Man and the Sea - Hemingway
For Whom the Bell Tolls - Hemingway
The Maltese Falcon - Daschiell Hammett
Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
The Grapes of Wrath - Steinbeck
To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee
The Republic - Plato
The Prince - Machiavelli
The Social Contract - Jean-Jaques Rousseau
The Wealth of Nations - Adam Smith
The Origin of Species - Charles Darwin
Das Kapital - Karl Marx
The Decline of the West - Oswald Spengler
Prometheus Bound - Aeschylus
Oedipus Rex - Sophocles
The Taming of the Shrew - William Shakespeare
Hamlet - Shakespeare
Othello - Shakespeare
Macbeth - Shakespeare
The Tempest - Shakespeare
Tartuffe - Moliere
Peer Gynt - Henrik Ibsen
A Doll's House - Henrik Ibsen
The Importance of Being Earnest - Oscar Wilde
Cyrano de Bergerac - Edmond Rostand
The Cherry Orchard - Anton Chekhov
Our Town - Thornton Wilder
Death of a Salesman - Arthur Miller
The Nicomachean Ethics - Aristotle
Meditations - Rene Descartes
Critique of Pure Reason - Immanuel Kant
The World as Will and Idea - Arthur Schopenhauer
Nature - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Self-Reliance - Ralph Waldo Emerson
Walden - Henry David Thoreau
How We Think - John Dewey


I also recently bought a collection of Oscar Wilde's work. It's fabulous... in fact getting this was the first time I'd ever read "The Picture Of Dorian Gray". It was incredible. I've been picking it up here and there and reading the other things in there as the mood hits me.

Anyway... I should go. I want to read some more! ::smile::

Comments

[spaced-oddity.livejournal.com]

I absolutely love To Kill A Mockingbird. I saw the play for it on Friday night, actually. It was good, but I much preferred the movie, because Gregory Peck is the best Atticus ever.

I love those quotes. I wish I knew Atticus, because he's just so...wise, and I'd love to learn from him. ^_^ Good thing we were assigned to read it in English class; I discovered an amazing book that way.

[hippie-chick.livejournal.com]

I agree. Gregory Peck *is* Atticus! I wish I could actually know him too because of that very thing... his wisdom and to talk to him and learn from him.

The first time I read this was for an assignment in school too. I read and discovered all kinds of great books that way! :)

[fabfan.livejournal.com]

Just like you, I love books, but don't read much anymore. I'm very impressed with the books you've read. I've read many of the sames ones you've read. Two books on the ultimate list that you should try and read, if you get a chance, are "The Grapes of Wrath" - Steinbeck and "Death of a Salesman" - Arthur Miller. I'm surprised that "Catcher in the Rye" wasn't on this list. It seems to have made most lists like this one.

[hippie-chick.livejournal.com]

I first read that book in the seventh grade. I was very suprised that it wasn't on there either. This is the list that was on several book sites, too.

I have heard about Grapes Of Wrath, have seen the film, and love it, just have never read the book. And I've heard about Death Of A Salesman too. So I'll have to read those for sure.

[lavendermusic.livejournal.com]

I love books! I read a lot in my spare time. (Not like I have a lot of spare time, though! lol)

[kmaxchicky16.livejournal.com]

polly,
this has nothing to do with this entry sorry..but how are my lucy icons coming along...if your still willing to make them..let me know okay?thanks!-kmaxchicky16

[hippie-chick.livejournal.com]

I emailed them to you about three days ago.... the address that is in your userinfo.