A few weeks ago I got a special coffee mug at a local used bookstore. It depicts several famous books, most of which I have already read...and reviewed on this blog. There are a few that I've yet to read. I thought it might be cool to list them all below in the order, from right to left, that they appear on my mug, then place a link on each title to my past blog article about it. So, here goes...
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell
The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger...read in 1972
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
The Complete Stories of Franz Kafka...read only the short story Metamorphosis
Brave New World by Aldeus Huxley
Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer...not yet
Catch 22 by Joseph Heller
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath...currently reading
The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett...not yet
Hamlet by William Shakespeare
On the Road Jack Kerouac
Ulysses by James Joyce
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
Little Women by Louise May Alcott
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll...from childhood
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez...not yet
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Lord of the Flies by William Golding
Crime and Punishment, for a reason I can't really figure out, is one of my favorite novels. I read it (and did a book report on it) when I was in junior high school at Rogers there in Ft Lauderdale. To make the book a little easier for me to get through I changed all the names to ones I could both remember and pronounce (Raskolnikov became Raymond and so on). I still have vivid memories of that book report, it was an oral one so I had to stand in front of the classroom and present it which was way out of my comfort zone. My presentation centered chiefly on the title, that the crime was the murder and the punishment was Raskolnikov's own inner torment. I concluded it by saying that his punishment ended when he was caught. I got an 'A' (what other grade would a teacher give a junior high school student who tackled Dostoevesky?). As I got older I've re-read it many times, most recently about two years ago, and I came to the same idea as you, that perhaps Columbo was based on Petrovich.
ReplyDeleteI've usually not enjoyed reading assigned books in school...the three big exceptions were Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger in the 11th Grade, City Boy by Herman Wouk in the 8th and Banner in the Sky (aka Third Man on the Mountain) by James Ramsey Ullman in the 7th. With Crime and Punishment, it's written in a clear, plain style I've grown to appreciate in literature. Sometimes I feel that writers who get too stylized and cryptic are trying to compensate for shortcomings in their stories...maybe not. In any event, I dug Crime and Punishment, too.
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