Finally getting around to this meme I've been meaning to do

[icepixie]

Fifteen books (and/or plays) you've read that will always stick with you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than fifteen minutes.

1. Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (also Ulysses)
2. Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
3. Bujold, Barrayar (also perhaps Shards of Honor and A Civil Campaign)
4. Steinbeck, East of Eden
5. White, The Trumpet of the Swan
6. Dahl, The Witches
7. Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
8. Helprin, The Winter's Tale
9. Byatt, Possession
10. Sewell, Black Beauty
11. Russell, The Sparrow
12. Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
13. Tolkien, LOTR
14. Wilder, Our Town
15. Stoppard, Arcadia

Fifteen Twenty poems:

1. Yeats, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree," "Song of Wandering Aengus," "The Wild Swans at Coole," and "Sailing to Byzantium"
5. Boland, "That the Science of Cartography is Limited" and "Mise Eire"
7. Parker, "Resume"
8. Millay, "Renascence," "Spring," "Recuerdo," and "Journey"
12. Heaney, "Digging" and "A Kite for Michael and Christopher"
13. Collins, "Fishing on the Susquehanna in July," "Nostalgia," and "Lying in Bed in the Dark, I Silently Address the Birds of Arizona"
17. Longfellow, "Woods in Winter"
18. Donne, "Song" (aka "Go and catch a falling star")
19. Coleridge, "The Nightingale"
20. Anonymous, "The Seafarer"

Comments

[icepixie]

Oh, lord, but I love that book. I read it at twenty-three, and it made me love John Steinbeck after detesting him for almost ten years thanks to reading The Grapes of Wrath when I was in high school. (I quickly went on to read Winter of Our Discontent, Travels with Charley, The Red Pony, and several short stories in quick succession.) It is such a beautiful, beautiful book, and still my favorite of his. One day, I very much want to visit Salinas.