BISAR

A while back I started a book club called "Books I Shoulda Already Read." For 6 books' time, it was a group that met face to face, had spirited meetings and sometimes watched the movie version, but Ulysses kind of killed it. So I then moved it to an online group.

The idea was to read "classics" from the "canon," whatever that means. Personally, I was looking for a motivation and a social element to help me get around to reading a lot of old books that I had always been curious about.


The group still technically exists, but we have been on a looong hiatus from reading books together. Here is what we read before it petered out:

The Sorrows of Young Werther - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Winesburg, Ohio - Sherwood Anderson
Mrs. Dalloway - Virginia Woolf
The Picture of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Ulysses - James Joyce
To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf
Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
The Analects - Confucius
The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
Bound For Glory - Woody Guthrie
Don Quixote - Don Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
A Confederacy Of Dunces - John Toole Kennedy
Alice In Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass - Lewis Carroll
Gulliver's Travels - Jonathan Swift
The Age Of Innocence - Edith Wharton
Giovanni's Room - James Baldwin
Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
Sometimes A Great Notion - Ken Kesey
Justine - Marquis de Sade
The Third Man - Graham Greene
Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
The Sound and The Fury - William Faulkner
Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
Sister Carrie - Theodore Dreiser

My favorites were Sometimes a Great Notion, The Age of Innocence, Anna Karenina, and Middlemarch. I had a very strong negative reaction to Faulkner but enjoyed most of the rest.

Books I Wish BISAR had read before it fizzled:

Vanity Fair
The Scarlet Letter
The Thousand and One Nights
Moby Dick
The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn
The Trial
Aesop's Fables
Grimm's Fairy Tales
Les Miserables
My Antonia