Ignoring work today

Jason O'Donnell
24 Comments

Ripped from plumerai

Instructions: Take this list of authors, remove those whose efforts do not grace your shelves, and bring the list up to ten by adding some more that do. Asterisk indicates newly added author.

Joyce Carol Oates
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce*
Toni Morrison*
William Shakespeare*
William Blake*
Emily Dickinson*
E.E. Cummings*
John Updike*
Charlotte Perkins Gilman *
Seamus Heaney ** added as an after-thought to replace the cop out Shakespeare entry.

—-
Should be interesting to see how the list changes from person to person….

24 thoughts on “Ignoring work today”

  1. I’m the only literate person I know.

    No one on my friends list reads really. So for your eyes:

    Ernest Hemingway
    Toni Morrison
    William Shakespeare
    Emily Dickinson
    John Updike
    Don DeLillo*
    Charles Bukowski*
    Nathaniel Hawthorne*
    William Faulkner*
    David Foster Wallace*

    1. Re: I’m the only literate person I know.

      Ah! Literate people make me happy. Love the list… Only one author I am unfamiliar with: DeLillo

      Looking closer at my own list I am thinking I should have replaced Shakspeare with Seamus Heaney… -eveyone- has Shakespeare, so its a total cop out for me.

      Seamus Heaney, on the other hand, is a realtively obscure genius when it comes to poetry and translations.

  2. Charlotte Perkins Gilman; love her.
    Funnily enough, I don’t actually OWN any Shakespeare! Read plenty, acted in plenty, can recite plenty. But own? Nope!

  3. Wow do we have different taste in reading material!!

    William Shakespeare
    Henry James*
    Nathanial Hawthorne*
    Edgar Allan Poe*
    Emily Bronte*
    Charlotte Bronte*
    Arthur Conan Doyle*
    Charles Dickens*
    Margaret Mitchell*
    Bruce Catton*

    1. Not too different…. I Have Henry James, Hawthorne, and Poe as well. And I OWN both Bronte’s but can’t stand them.

    2. I’ve never met another person that likes Hawthorne.
      And I’m a freakin English major!

      Well maybe a couple, but not enough.

      I think that if the school systems did not force 13 and 14 year olds to read “The Scarlet Letter” at such a young age, there would be a lot more people who could enjoy the other works of Hawthorne. I know when I had to read it my freshman year in High School I wanted to die and never touch Hawthorne ever again. But when I got to college, one of my classes involved exhaustive reading of Hawthorne and I fell in love. The Haunted Mind, is one of my favorite shorts.

      1. You are so right!! I love the Scarlet Letter now, but in Jr. High School it was pure torture! I’ve never read The Haunted Mind, but I definitely will now.

      2. I have to agree with why people get turned off of Hawthorne. His short stuff should be what’s taught in high school. I haven’t read Scarlet Letter since high school, and I keep saying I want to give it another chance, but that memory still holds me back. Can’t believe I didn’t have to read it as part of my Early American Authors courses in college, but we concentrated on Hawthorne’s short stuff. I did have to suffer through Moby-Dick though.

        1. His short works are all I have read, and I intend to keep it that way. He was much better in brevity than in full-blown novel form.

  5. Ernest Hemingway*
    James Joyce*
    William Shakespeare*
    William Blake*
    Emily Dickinson*
    E.E. Cummings*
    John Updike*
    Michael Cunningham
    Mercedes Lackey
    Marian Zimmer Bradley

    2. More Sci-Fi than you can shake a stick at

      ‘Cuz I’m not literary at ALL!!!

      Mercedes Lackey
      Marian Zimmer Bradley
      Anne McCaffrey*
      Robert Heinlein*
      Andre Norton*
      Stephen R. Donaldson*
      Anne Rice*
      Patricia Cornwell*
      Michael Crichton*
      Nora Roberts*

  6. Loved your list — I’m going to do mine at my journal. The only one on your list I’m not familiar with is Gilman. Any suggestions on a good introduction to her?

    I’m a friend of Karen’s from the old days, btw.

        1. 🙂 Of course… and I speak highly of Karen. One of my most favourtist peoples around. Hopefully I can live up to her words, though I fear I will probably fall short more often than not.

          2. Friends of friends

            I must say, that is a nifty feature of LJ, checking out the journals of your friends’ friends 🙂 I’ve read some fascinating stuff that way, and met many interesting people.

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