Claire Wright's Reading List

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I will always remember my writing prof, Claire Wright.  She was one of -- if not the -- best teachers I had through my whole university career.  I only wish that I had discovered my passion (I guess it's a passion) for writing ealier and had gotten to take more of her courses.  I think she retired this year; I never got a reply to my last email.  My friend MIchelle and I still reminice about that class.  She would read us excerpts of things at the start of each class and one of our "assignments" was to keep a list of everything she read us.  And then copy it and turn it in at the end.  Nothing fancy, just to prove that we did it, I guess.  There were some books there that I'd read before and other's I'd heard of ("classics") but never picked up and also some new up-and-coming writers that she'd found and loved.  She told us that she would get emails from former students saying her reading list was the best thing they got out of her class.  I discovered my love for Bill Bryson in her class.

Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth
David Mamet, Oleanna
George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1984, Down & Out in London & Paris, Shooting an Elephant
Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club
Evelyn Lau, Runaway: Diary of a Street Kid
Lytton Strachey, Queen Victoria, Eminent Victorians
Tillie Olsen, Tell Me a Riddle
Phyllis Rose, Parallel Lives: Five Victorian Marriages
Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death
Ronald Blythe, Akenfield
Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer
Peter Mayle, A Year in Provence, Toujours Provence
W. Somerset Maughan, The Moon and Sixpence, The Vagrant Mood, Cakes and Ale, Liza of Lambeth
E.M. Forster, Passage to India, A Room With a View, Howard's End, Maurice
ed. Lorna  Crozier and Patrick Lane, Addicted: Notes from the Belly of the Beast
Patrick Lane, There is a Season
Richard Wright, Black Boy, Native Son
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Beloved
Rory Stewart, The Places In Between
Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul, Snow, My Name is Red
Margaret McMillan, Women of the Raj, Paris 1919
Sebastian Faulks, Birdsong
Bill Bryson, From Here to There
Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking, A Book of Common Prayer
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera
Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake
Alice Walker, The Colour Purple
Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man
Anatole France, "La Derniere Classe"
Guy de Maupassant, "La Parure"
Jose Saramago, Blindness
Alan Bennett, The History Boys

I've only read three books on that list, One Hundred Years, Cholera and Black Boy (in grade 9!) but I've read like 3 other Amy Tan books (and they are all pretty much the same...).  This isn't your typical reading list -- there's no literary classics like Shakespeare or Dickens thank god.  I don't think I'll be able to put much of a dent into it until I get back to Canada though.  How many have you read?

Comments

[moeruze-burning.livejournal.com]

I've read...

George Orwell's Animal Farm (and did not like it ;dfoighd :||| )

And had a major role in a play based on The Invisible Man. : D;;

[iaoiua.livejournal.com]

I've only read six - Animal Farm, The Joy Luck Club, Native Son, Beloved, One Hundred Years of Solitude, and Love in the Time of Cholera - but I haven't read a book since the final HP. That is very sad.

[frazzled-niya.livejournal.com]

I've read none but I have seen the movie adaptions XD

Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes
Amy Tan, Joy Luck Club