Pencey Prepsters

I love how much people get inspired by the Catcher in the Rye.

If you really want to you can buy your very own Pencey Prep sweaters

I even saw a pair of customised shoes

never growing older, never growing wiser

Deeply enjoying the pace and prose of David Copperfield, this is a favourite....


To live among the trees, never growing older, never growing wiser, children ever, rambling hand in hand through sunshine and among flowery meadows, laying down our heads on moss at night.


Such beautiful imagery, so richly evocative.

Progress

I am enjoying Dickens's David Copperfield so much more than expected it's witty, beautiful & moving 

The list hits 95 titles

Thanks to the many wonderful suggestions I have received for the book list, it is now at 95 books!

Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë

Jamaica Inn – Daphne Du Maurier

Iliad – Homer

War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

1984 – George Orwell

Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger

Gulliver’s Travels – Jonathan Swift

Lord Of The Flies  - William Golding

Brave New World – Aldous Huxley

Tess of The D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy

Slaughterhouse 5 – Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

David Copperfield - Charles Dickens

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

The Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck

Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  - Philip K. Dick

Murders In The Rue Morgue – Edgar Allen Poe

Middlemarch – George Elliot

The Sirens of Titan - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Bleak House – Charles Dickens

Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert

The Time Machine – HG Wells

Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen

Foundation – Isaac Asimov

Ulysses – James Joyce

Paradise Lost – Milton

The Pearl – John Steinbeck

Twenty thousand Leagues Under The Sea – Jules Verne

I Claudius – Robert Graves

The Big Sleep – Raymond Chandler

East Of Eden - John Steinbeck

Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray

Odyssey – Homer

Midnight's Children – Salman Rushdie

Diceman - George Cockcroft

To Kill A Mockingbird – Harper Lee

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Berniéres

Persuasion – Jane Austen

Animal Farm – George Orwell

Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco

Lord Of The Rings – JRR Tolkien

Cat’s Cradle - Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré

Neuromancer – William Gibson

A Perfect Spy – John Le Carré

Little Women – Louisa May Alcott

The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien

100 Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Cider With Rosie – Laurie Lee

A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes

The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald

Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man – James Joyce   

Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov

Catch 22 - Joseph Heller

The Sound and The Fury – William Faulkner

Sons and Lovers – DH Lawrence

The Wings Of The Dove – Henry James

A Handful of Dust – Evelyn Waugh

As I Lay Dying- William Faulkner

The French Lieutentant’s Woman – John Fowles

Howards End – EM Forster

Tropic of Cancer – Henry Miller

On The Road – Jack Kerouac

Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad

Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh

The Call of the Wild – Jack London

Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie

Wide Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys

Naked Lunch – William S Burroughs

The Magus – John Fowles

Gravity’s Rainbow – Thomas Pynchon

A Town Like Alice – Neville Shute

Pilgrim’s Progress – John Bunyan

Robinson Crusoe – Daniel Dafoe

Dangerous Liaisons - Pierre Choderlos De Laclos

Emma – Jane Austen

Frankenstein – Mary Shelley

The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorn

Moby Dick – Herman Melville

The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins

Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy

Hucklebury Finn – Mark Twain

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde - Robert Louis Stevenson

Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K. Jerome

The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy

Nostromo - Joseph Conrad

In Search of Lost Time - Marcel Proust

The Trial - Franz Kafka

The Pursuit Of Love - Nancy Mitford

Lucky Jim - Kingsley Amis

Waiting for the Barbarians - J.M. Coetzee

Money - Martin Amis

200th Birthday Celebrations

Today is the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens.  This morning I finished reading The Catcher In The Rye, and instead of rolling a dice or sticking a pin into the list to choose the next book I decided to read the first Dickens book on the list I that came across, to honour his birthday.


And the first book I discovered as I perused the list was David Copperfield, so the decision has been made, this is the next book for me to explore and discover on my voyage through the greatest literature in the canon.

Hugely admired by Tolstoy, David Copperfield is the novel that draws most closely from Charles Dickens's own life. Its eponymous hero, orphaned as a boy, grows up to discover love and happiness, heartbreak and sorrow amid a cast of eccentrics, innocents, and villains. 


Praising Dickens's power of invention, Somerset Maugham wrote: "There were never such people as the Micawbers, Peggotty and Barkis, Traddles, Betsey Trotwood and Mr. Dick, Uriah Heep and his mother. They are fantastic inventions of Dickens's exultant imagination...you can never quite forget them."


"The most perfect of all the Dickens novels."
--Virginia Woolf

Fan fiction

I read this interesting thing about the Catcher in The Rye recently. 


In 2009 author J D Salinger successfully sued to stop the U.S. publication of a novel that presents Holden Caulfield as an old man.


The novel's author, Fredrik Colting, commented, "call me an ignorant Swede, but the last thing I thought possible in the U.S. was that you banned books." 


The issue is complicated by the nature of Colting's book, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, which has been compared to fan fiction. Although commonly not authorized by writers, no legal action is usually taken against fan fiction since it is rarely published commercially and thus involves no profit. Colting, however, has published his book commercially. Unauthorized fan fiction on The Catcher in the Rye existed on the Internet for years without any legal action taken by Salinger before his death.

Next up!

So this morning I finished Orwell's 1984, but today is a quiet day, so rather than rest on my laurels, I  have rolled the dice and come up with J D Salinger's 'The Catcher In The Rye' for my next classic read from the list

I will start it this afternoon, I have not read it before so have no idea what to expect, although I feel I know a lot about it already as it is such an infamous novel.